 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, Episode 767. 767, wait, backwards, 767. For Monday, June 24th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We take all that stuff, we mix it together, we jumble it up, and then we sort it out, we sift through it, and the idea is all of us, every one of us, by answering your questions or listening to the answers to your questions, by sharing your cool stuff found or hearing cool stuff found shared, same goes with quick tips. The goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Linode or Linode, depending on your choice of pronunciation, it doesn't matter, you go to linode.com.mgg or otherworldcomputing at maxsales.com or xperion.com.mgg or linkedin.com.mgg. We'll talk about why you wanna go to all of those links shortly. But here, where I should be sitting next to Pilot Pete because it's Episode 767 and that's what he flies, but he's actually busy actually doing some family stuff today so he couldn't make it. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is Johnnef Braun. How you doing today, Mr. Johnnef Braun? Just Ed? Come on, we get to do a show. This is like as good as it gets, right? I mean, you know, how lucky are we? Yes, indeed. All right, so we have some tips and all kinds of crazy stuff. Why won't that behave? You know, I hate it when my computer won't behave. And you know, maybe that's the whole point of this. You know, that there you go. Maybe that's what it is. All right, but we have some quick tips that hopefully will help our computers behave better. Heder sends in one and says, when adding an event to the calendar in iOS, your date and time picker might be either in one minute or five minute intervals. Mine was for years set to five minutes, which bothered me because I wanted to add some more precise calendar events like train or bus or plane schedules. Then I discovered that if you double tap on the minute selector, it will actually change this view. Now I finally can hyper schedule everything. And he's right, yeah, I just tap on the selector and it changes from five to five minute increments to one minute increments. I had no idea about that. Did you, John? No, I know. This is what we love about doing the show is we all get to learn. We get to make our computers work better. And you know, our iPhones are computers for the, at least for the sake of argument in this show. We could have a larger conversation where I would also argue that point, but for the sake of this show, it's not an argument. It's just an easy way to classify things. So, all right, so that was from Petter. The next quick tip is from Peter, but it's actually from, he noted that Craig Federighi at the John Gruber's talk show shared another quick tip. He said, on the iPhone 10, 10S10R, I've brought up the app switcher by dragging up and then right when, and then the apps fan out. So there's that one motion up and right. You scroll and select the one that you want. Craig showed probably the standard way. Just drag left or right on the bar at the bottom of the screen to go one app at a time. He said, I had no idea about this. So I guess this is a dual quick tip for whichever one you didn't already know. Yeah, and you're totally right, Peter. Right, so you can bring up the app switcher by swiping up and going right, kind of a little right angle thing, if you will. And you draw that little curve and then boom, the app switcher comes up. But if you just wanna switch to the previous app or the next app in the queue, just grab the little bar at the bottom on the buttonless iPhones and you can swipe around and get right to where you wanna go. And this works on the buttonless iPads too. But yeah, it's pretty handy. The one weird part is that the order changes. So let's say I'm in mail and I go to Safari. If I spend any amount of time in Safari, you know, let's say Safari was the previous app that I used. So I'm in mail, I swipe that little bar to the right, meaning I'm moving to the left, right? So I'm swiping mail off to the right. Now I'm in Safari, I do some stuff in Safari. My feeling would be that I could swipe left and get back to mail, no, no. Now that I've spent time in Safari, that's the frontmost app. So now I have to go left to get to mail. It's a little bit wonky in that regard. I'm not sure why Apple thinks that that's how it should work, but yet that is how it works. So the app that you just spent any amount of time in will be the rightmost app in that list. So you almost always have to go left to get to other apps. But yeah, thanks Peter, that's great. Cool stuff. Yeah, any thoughts on these, John? I like my button, don't take my button away. Oh no, your button's gone. Your next iPhone won't have a button. At nor will your next iPad. And I have to say, it really isn't. It is progress that I am happy to be a part of. It's really not, it's not bad. I think you, some people, depending on how you use the device would complain more about the lack of a headphone jack than the lack of a button. But functionally, not having a button is actually quite fantastic. It really is. It's not a bad change to make. It is change and I grok that, but it is not a bad change to make. So don't fear the lack of a button. There's something in there about a reaper. I don't know how to get there from here. So we will go to Paul because I know how to get there from here. Paul says, I wanted to share a cool stuff found that I only recently discovered which was news to the folks at my local Apple store. So I thought it might be useful for some of our listeners. I have been for some time trying to find ways to change my workflow to allow me to carry only an iPad. However, it was constantly blocked by one particular app. I'm a consultant in the UK who normally works with big banks. This means I must use windows on their desktop machines through terminals if I'm in the office or through the Citrix client on my Mac or iPad. The problem with the iPad version is that if you don't have a mouse, or that you don't have a mouse, given that you are using a Windows environment, this is quite clumsy at best and downright impossible at worst. I've been chatting with the business team at the Edinburgh Apple Store for quite some time to try and find a solution. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I happened to cross a forum thread full of others with the same problem and I found a link to a mouse that works with the Citrix app on iPad and presumably on iPhone. He says, though, I don't expect that experience would be all that pleasant. I could go with that, yeah. And he says it's a little on the expensive side for a thing that only works with one app. He says it's about 95 pounds so it looks like you can get it in the US for 60 US dollars. But if you are like me and must use a Windows environment through Citrix for most of your working day and only want to carry an iPad, this is awesome. He says, I know mouse support is coming in iPad OS 13, but given what I have read and seen, the mouse is pretty much replicating the touch interface so this little device might still be quite valuable. Yeah, pretty cool. We'll put a link to it. It's called the Citrix X1 mouse. So there you go. That's what it is. Pretty good. I like it. Pretty good. Cool. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun, before we move on? I don't think I've used anything Citrix or quite a while. So looking at them here. Oh. Yeah, virtualization, applications, server, networking. Yeah, they do a little of everything. Cloud, software as a service, huh? Yeah, no, Citrix I use for their go-to meeting all the time with people that works quite well, because you get the full camera interface and everything like that. Yeah, it's great for meetings. Okay. All right, moving on. We might as well stay in Cool Stuff Foundland here. Dennis has a follow-up to the Cool Stuff Foundland mentioned to right-click on the Safari plus button to access recently closed tabs. He says a very cool utility for Chrome and Firefox is one tab that allows us to save all open tabs before closing the browser. It does that as a list in a new tab. What makes it very powerful is that you can then organize that list of links in various ways, grouping of links, drag and drop, sorting of links. And since it's a browser plugin, it works cross-platform. Very cool. Thank you for that, Dennis. I like that. Good stuff, man. Pretty good. This is what we love about Cool Stuff Foundland. It always bugs me when I'm using Firefox where it's like, hey, you're gonna lose all your stuff when you quit. It's like, no, save all my stuff when I quit. I want you to save my stuff. So there you go. Pits it all in one tab. Let's you organize it. Pretty good, huh? Use Firefox or Chrome for anything, John? Usually if something doesn't work in Safari, I'll then go to Firefox and then, lastly, I'll go to Chrome. Or if I need to run some Flash stuff. Sure, sure. Oh, good. I do it through Chrome. Right, right. We have found for the, we use Google Hangouts for a lot of stuff here at Mac Observer. And especially we use it for a daily meeting because it's an easy way to get everybody together on video and we can see each other and chit chat briefly and go on with our day. And while it appears as those Hangouts works fine in Safari and perhaps Firefox, one issue that has happened routinely in Safari as of late is that if you are using Safari, you will not necessarily hear all of the other participants. You will hear some of them, but not all of them. So we found that for Hangouts, way better to standardize on Chrome, which makes sense. I mean, it's a Google product. So whatever little tweaks and changes they're gonna make, they're gonna be reflected in their browser. So we use Chrome for Hangouts. It's way easier and it's cool because I can just put the links to the Hangouts right in the Chrome task bar and it makes life way simpler. Good, good. I've had, well, so I've got a couple of cool stuffs found, John. One is Konex, K-A-N-E-X has some very cool, what they call DuraBraid cables, which are these braided cables for a variety of purposes, different purposes, easy for me to say. The cool ones that I have found lately are they have audio cables. So either lightning or USB-C, two separate cables, to the mini eight audio stereo, like aux-in, is what we would call that. So if your car doesn't do Bluetooth or anything like that, or you just need to use aux-in regularly, this lightning to aux cable saves you from having to use different adapters and anything like that. It's just one thing, boom, plug it in, good to go. And it's a sturdy cable with this DuraBraid stuff. So I've been very, very happy about those and they work quite well. So I'll put a link to those in the show notes, but that's pretty cool to have a single cable to go to an aux port kind of feels like the old days, which makes life way easier, just good. It won't charge, of course, so bear that in mind, but you get data or audio, not data, just audio. Sometimes that's all you need. Thoughts on that, John? All right. There he is, Mr. Braun. Okay. John, you and I were at PEPCOM the other night and we saw actually lots and lots of different cool things. PEPCOM just being an event that it's essentially speed dating for the press is what it is. Companies will just set up a bunch of companies will each set up a table, no booths. And you just run around and the only attendees are press and makes life really easy and super efficient. And we saw lots of cool stuff. Some of it isn't available yet. So we won't mention any of the stuff that's not available. I don't think it's secret. It's just that I don't want to frustrate you by telling you about something that you can't just click on and go and get if it interests you. So we will save those for a future week when they are available and then we'll tell you because there's some cool stuff. But the one that is available is from My Charge, they've got, and they've had for a while their wireless charging power bank, right? Where it's got a cheap pad on it. But this one is the wireless, the My Charge Unplugged Dual 10K. So it's a 10K power bank. It's got a cheap pad on it. So you can put your phone right on the bank and the size of the bank, it's a little thicker than your phone but it's about the same dimensions as your phone. So you could hold the two together if you needed to say make a call while your phone was charging this way. And then it's also got two USB-A ports on the bottom of it for output power. So lots of cool options with this, including if you charge this up on your hotel, in your hotel room during the day, then you could just put this next to your bed. You don't have to fight for a plug behind the table and all that stuff. You just put your phone on top of it, charge it. It's got 10,000 milliamp hours. So that'll charge your phone probably four, maybe five times. And then you could plug in like your watch cable into one of the USB ports and you're good to go. What makes this dual is that it also has a cheap coil on the bottom of it to charge from. So you don't even have to plug it into charge and it will do pass-through charging too. So if you've got a cheap pad, you put the charger, you put this power brick on it, whatever you wanna call it, this battery on it. And then you put your phone on top of that and make a little sandwich and it'll charge your phone first and then charge the battery next. So it's all very cool and makes life pretty easy and it's 60 bucks on Amazon. So we'll put a link to that. Pretty good. But that's the unplugged dual. Just bear that in mind because there are many of, they have like the unplugged, which looks very similar, but won't charge via Qi. And maybe that doesn't matter for you and then you could get one of the other ones. But there you go. So pretty good, Han-John. I like it. Same. Yeah. Thoughts to share? Yeah, I've noticed some phone vendors have been advertising the ability to use your phone to charge someone else's. Samsung has some do that. Via Qi or is it just with a cable? I think it's Qi, yeah. Oh, really? That's interesting. Huh. Yeah, you probably skipped all those commercials. But no, I've seen it. So, you know, somebody's like, oh, I need a charge. And it's like, oh, okay, put your phone on top of my phone. Ah, that's pretty good. Huh, why not, right? That's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Good, good, good. Where are we on time here? We have time for, yeah, we can, oh, actually we've got some great questions to go to. The first thing I wanna do though is talk about our first two sponsors. If that's okay by you, Mr. Braun. Of course. All right. Listen, your credit score is something that up until now, you have not been able to control on your own. Well, Experian Boost changes that. You go to Experian.com slash MGG. That's E-X-P-E-R-I-A-N dot com slash MGG. And they will let you link all the bills that you pay with your bank account. So whatever that is, water, gas, electric cable, cell phone, you link them all up and instantly and for free. Did I mention that this is free? 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Hey, business owners, I know you're out there. We've got a lot of you folks that are running your own consulting businesses. We've got a lot of folks that are running all kinds of businesses and we're answering your questions. That's great. One question that we don't really answer here is how do you find good people? Well, now I have an answer for you and that's through our sponsor, LinkedIn Jobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. That's where you can go to get $50 off your first job post. Now, why LinkedIn? Well, you know me. I'm a big fan of what I like to call the unfair competitive advantage. You know what? Unfair competitive advantage LinkedIn has over every other job board. LinkedIn has everyone there even if they're not looking for a job, right? Because we're all on LinkedIn all the time. You know, posting our updates, we post our MGG episodes there. People are updating their profiles, keeping their skills in line. Yeah, all the things that you need to know if you want to hire someone. So LinkedIn can work to match you with candidates that are perfect for the position and your company. And sometimes, in fact, more often than sometimes, I would say more often than not, the right person for your job is not necessarily someone that's out there looking for a job. Well, LinkedIn's got them. More than 610 million members visit LinkedIn to make connections, learn and grow as professionals and discover new job opportunities. You've got to check this out. I have used this and it works. And you can get $50 off your first job post. Like I said, go to LinkedIn.com slash MGG. Terms and conditions apply as always, but you've got to check this out. Go to LinkedIn.com slash MGG. Our thanks to LinkedIn jobs for sponsoring this episode. All right, let us go to James. Take me to James, John. All right, James says that he's running out of space and he's not sure what his best path forward is. So he has an iMac whose internal SSD goes mostly unused because his photos library is on an external two terabyte SSD RAID zero RA, which is not running out of space. Additionally, has a time machine drive, just a regular four terabyte hard drive, but it's constantly full, very noisy and may also be too small to back up the iMac and external photos SSD. To my mind, the simplest solution to the storage problem is to get a bigger like for like drives to replace the current one. This involves a lot of work. We'll probably need to be repetitively there right now and then and at the end of each of those cycles, I'll have documented but perfectly functional drives to get rid of decommissioned. Sorry, it feels inelegant and wasteful. My ideal solution would be a hard drive array that allows for multiple volumes incorporating both time machine and photo volumes, which can both be dynamically resized simply by popping in new SSDs. Is this a thing? If not, maybe two separate drivers, one for photos and one for time machine, be an option. I haven't heard good things about Drobo recently, but it's all I can think of that seems like it might fit the bill. If I were to plot my priorities on a project manager's squared, I'd want the external, oh man, there's a line break there. I can't read this. To be fast, SSD or Thunderbolt I think that's just that line there and expandable. It would be fine giving up on cost to make those things happen. As for the old full time machine drive, this never actually presents an issue. It just makes me a bit anxious. I already have back blades running, it would be fine with time machine not having several months or years of data. Is there a key list modification launch agent or something I can use to make time machine both generate and keep ground fewer backups? All right, here we go. Let's start off with photos. I think what you're doing now is the best solution for photos. And Apple confirms this because they have a nice little article called move your photos library to save space on your Mac. But here's one line in there that I think should drive your decision as to what to use. To prevent data loss, Apple doesn't recommend storing photo libraries on external storage devices like SD cards and USB flash drives or drives that are shared on a network. In other words, don't put a photos library on a NAS. No, and I can attest to this. This is one of those do as I say and as I do scenarios. I would love to store my photos library on a NAS. I did that with my iFotos libraries and it mostly worked okay. There were some occasional issues with it but by and large, iFoto was totally functional on a NAS. With photos, that is not the case. Whatever they're doing with the structure of the library, putting it on a NAS is no bueno. You might be able to get away with putting it on like a disk image on your NAS but like I wouldn't but maybe or an iSCSI partition on your NAS maybe but I wouldn't. I would just do it on an external direct attach drive given everything that we've seen about this. I as tempted as I am to put it on my NAS in some way, I have not and will not. So there you go. Hopefully that helps support theories. Yeah, yeah. Now it's for time machine, having a direct connect driver array can certainly do it but I'd like to suggest in this case, a NAS like a Drobo or a Synology because they both support time machine and they also support defining and expanding the size of the amount of space that can be used. You could do it with a direct connect as it sounds like you're doing it already here and resorts partitions and all that stuff but that makes me kind of jumpy. Yes. Yeah, so that was kind of what he was proposing is I should probably use one thing for photos backup and one thing for time machine. So I would agree with that. As for modifying time machine behavior, I mean there's two things you can do. One is time machine editor which lets you change the frequency at which time machine does its thing which I think is normally once every hour which in my opinion is too much. I think I set it for once every eight hours. And then just use good judgment in excluding things which is system preferences, time machine options. I personally exclude very large files like my photos library what else and I think my parallels VMs because they're all like multi-gigabyte and I just don't want to use a time machine for that. I will back it up when I'm doing a clone. I just back up everything with my clone. Yeah, that would be my suggestion is keep the huge. I would exclude very large files and that's what I got. All right, so I'm gonna, what you suggested isn't necessarily, it certainly isn't wrong. I mean, obviously we'll work just fine. I will put an asterisk on work just fine. This is one of those do as I say not as I do scenarios. Time machine over the network, we've talked about it a lot on this show over many episodes is not really reliable. It's not built to be used over the network. It will work, but occasionally, and I would say expect it to happen once to twice a year, your backup destination will get corrupted because there would have been some network disconnect that caused that corruption during a backup and you need to wipe your backup and start from scratch or painstakingly go through and try and repair your time machine backup. So if you are doing this over the network with time machine, just expect that to happen. That's what I do. I know it's what you do to John. So, you know, like it works. It's fine, but it is not optimal for time machine just so you know. That said, if you're going to do direct attached for photos, which you have to do and you want that to be a expandable solution and you also want a similarly expandable solution for time machine and you want those volumes to be sort of malleable or adjustable in size. I would actually do both as direct attached. I would do them both on the same volume and I would use APFS for this. So let's start with the volume. I would go with, as James mentioned, some JBOD, just a bunch of disks type of solution. So, other world computing has lots of these Thunder Bay raid enclosures that will do this. But you can also just go online and find all sorts of different JBOD enclosures obviously if you want one that has the support and backing of a company like OWC, then that's where I would go and get this, but there are options, right? And Mac OS is actually pretty good at stitching these together. I would then make that into an APFS formatted blob of data because the nice part about APFS is that you can have multiple volumes on that blob of data and adjust them. So it's not the partitioning thing that we used to think about with HFS plus. It's APFS, you can change the size, you can change the quota essentially. So let's say, yeah, limit the time machine one to X number of gigabytes so that it doesn't just use up all your data. And I think that might actually give you the solution you're looking for. So JBOD and APFS with two volumes or three volumes if you wanna have a third volume for something, that might do it. The only issue with that is you, what I just suggested involves no RAID. Now you could do RAID instead of just the JBOD and with RAID you get one drives worth of fault tolerance which also means you get the expandability of RAID where you can add drives to this thing as you move forward. So those are my thoughts. Let's just, you know, different, different idea, a bunch of different ideas, I don't know. Any more thoughts from you, John? No, it's interesting though because my time machine backups, actually the one on my MacBook Pro is, let's see, oldest backup, June 20th, 2018. Okay, so you're... And it hasn't corrupted yet. Yet, right. So we'll see. That's pretty good though. I mean, that's longer than I would expect it to go. And that's obviously a year. So yeah, that's pretty good. Cool? Cool? All right, are we good with that one from James? Yes. Cool. John, not you, but I mean, you're here, but listener John says, so I was going through some things and realized that I use, oh, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, we already talked about choosy. He had a question. We talked about choosy last week. He says, I am constantly plagued on my Mac with autocorrect issues. While I know the simple answer is to turn it off, it does catch an awful lot of mistypes, which I do like. My issues seem to center around the period. Usually when I'm trying to type a URL, it decides that when I hit a period, that is when it should invoke autocorrect or it should put a space after the period or put a space in the concatenated first word at the front of the URL. All of these, of course, require me to go back and correct the text and hope it doesn't correct again. I know, and here's a quick tip for those of you that don't. He says, I know that if I hit escape, it dismisses and undoes the autocorrect. So there's the quick tip. But a lot of the time I'm typing fast enough that I don't even see the mini autocorrect dialogue before I hit the period and I just blast through it. And you're right. You can also use undo sometimes with command Z if you don't catch it with the escape. But yes, I'm with you on this. He says the question, is there a way to set rule-based behavior for autocorrect so that I can retain the, you know, TEH to THE and lowercase I to capital I corrections? But I can say ignore a period as a marker for a correction to be initiated when it's in a URL. I don't know, man. This is a good one. So maybe this becomes a geek challenge. I don't know of any way to really tweak autocorrect other than if there's something specific that it keeps correcting and you don't want it to correct it, then you can go into system preferences, keyboard, text. And in there put, this is where you can set your own text expansion or replacements, whatever you want to call it. If you put both, you put the same thing in for both. So let's say, for example, that you wanted, like for me, I like to use the word cogitating. It's a great word, right? We are always cogitating on things around here. Autocorrect doesn't like it. So I put cogitating in both the replace and with column spelled exactly the same and that will keep autocorrect from messing with that word. Cause it says, oh yeah, right. When he types this, he means this. Yeah, exactly. And so that's fine, but there's no way to say don't do it after a period. There's no rules based adjustments you can make just very specific text. So I don't know what the magic would be. Paul Frans in our chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream suggests perhaps a keyboard shortcut to disable autocorrect for a period of time. So a toggle that you could do with your keyboard. I bet there's a way to do that with keyboard maestro. Is there? I think so, yeah. Cause you just go in and uncheck the box in that same place, system preferences, keyboard text, uncheck the correct spelling automatically. There are two other boxes there, at least on, I haven't put Mojave on this machine yet cause it's the audio machine and I always keep it where it is for a while. But capitalize words automatically and add a period with a double space could be things that maybe you don't want to have enabled either. So there you go. Are you running Mojave on the machine that you're looking at, John? Does your system preferences, keyboard, text have those three check boxes? Mojave, let's see, where are we going? System preferences, keyboard, then what? Text. Yeah, let's see, correct spelling automatically, capitalize words automatically, add a period with double space. Okay, so you have the same three check boxes. Yeah, I have found on my machines that I only check the first one and not the other two just cause it gets in my way more often than not. But you know, you can, so perhaps messing with those will do it. But if anybody knows of a way to really, you know, manipulate the rules that it uses, feedback at macgeekab.com, we'd love to hear from you. John, I said feedback at macgeekab.com. I don't know if I quite heard that. Did you say feedback at macgeekab.com? I did, have you had your caffeine yet today, Mr. Braun? Yeah, I'm working on it. Okay, all right, good. All right, you wanna take us to Paul, John? Yeah, I was just looking at something here regarding, it looks like there may be a way to actually edit. Yeah, that's an old article. Edit what? Yeah, there's a, they have an article that talks about how to edit the system dictionary. Oh, interesting. Huh. How to remove a word you added to the dictionary on macOS? It's from 2016. Huh. No, I just searched for edit mac dictionary. Yeah. And there are a few things out there. All right. It's kind of roundabout, though. Yeah, it sounds right. All right. Cool. Cool. Well, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. So, at least it's there. Yeah, did you find it? I found one, so I put that link there. But if you've got something, put another link. It's all good. Okay. All right. Paul. All right, where are we? Paul, Paul, Paul. All right, Paul. Gentlemen, I just wanted to put my two cents in. Personally, with the next version of macOS, I think everyone should nuke and pay for one reason. The OS is pure 64-bit. The upgrade should clean things up, but there are just too many variables to consider. There isn't the same type of control over macOS as there is in iOS. I've upgraded my machine late 2013 MacBook Pro Retina. Every kind of updated ever since Mavericks with no issues. And I think after six years, it's time for a fresh start. I know the supplies. I know this is apples and oranges, no pun intended. But if you ever upgraded your Windows Vista 7.8 or 8.1 to Windows 10, it worked, but it just didn't feel right. Things were just a bit off and the nuke and pay was the fix. Okay. And he brings up a good point, especially in light of the fact that the warnings that we've been getting for a while now on 32-bit apps will come up and say, hey, this is not optimized for your Mac. Right. So that's what that's saying then. Now, Apple does have a little ditty though to prepare you for this. Okay. I had it out for a while and it's called 32-bit app compatibility with macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 and later. Okay. And they have a suggestion in there that's something that I did recently. So I may want to try this first, but using very system tools, you can identify your lingering 32-bit apps and update them before you do the upgrade. When I did a scan, I was actually surprised to find that it was my scan snap software was 32-bit and I'm like, what? Huh? I hadn't updated it for a while and I went to their site and they had a whole different suite or a whole different upgrade. Well, that's good. 64-bits. Okay. So most of it is in where system report, software applications, I think, if you click on that, it'll show you the bittiness of things. Yep. So you can look through that. You can also look, I mean, activity monitor, that's another place and I think they suggest that as well. You can see all the running processes. And I think Apple's, it was funny though because when I did this in the past, Apple still had one or two 32-bit daemons or background processes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Apple was for a little while. I mean, the Finder was one of the last Apple apps to make the jump to 64-bit, right? I mean, it's there now and it's been there for a little while, but it was kind of funny to see, well, wait a minute, what do you mean 64-bit? But yeah, it's all there now. Clean My Mac is another way to not only find what 64-bit, but Clean My Mac will also suggest updates. They have a really big database of apps and so they can tell you, hey, no, no, no, like this app's floating out here. You might wanna update it. But yeah, go ahead. So yeah, I'm curious as to any more thoughts you have on Paul. Yeah, I mean, if you're unable to purge or update to all 64-bits, then yeah, I agree that a new campaign would probably be a good thing. Of course, personally, I'm gonna try to purge my system of all things and see how their migration assistant does or their updater how it does. Yep. See what it catches. Yeah, and remember, it's not only updating the apps and such, it's adding another volume and putting all your system files out there. But as we discussed last week, that's, and really as we just discussed, talking about James a few minutes ago, adding another volume to an APFS drive is nothing because it doesn't partition. So that really isn't that big of a deal in terms of the process of it. It might have some functional impact on a few apps, but really it shouldn't on most things. If they've been following the rules, then it shouldn't be a problem. So yeah. All right, anything else on this with Paul? Nope, can't wait. Okay. I actually wait, I should get the beta. No, I shouldn't. Yeah, you should. I've been running, no, I've been running the beta on an external drive on one of my machines. Absolutely, it's worth running. Yeah, I'm gonna put something together. I will say that the beta has been running super smooth for me. Like, the only reason I'm not running it as my main OS other than perhaps the obvious, it's still beta one man is mail plugins, which is constantly an issue with OS updates. I use small cubes mail suite, but mail will not launch or will not load a plugin that doesn't explicitly advertise that it is compatible with the current version of mail which changes with a major OS update. So even if there's no fundamental changes in the way mail uses plugins and it doesn't seem like there is, but I say that is very much in my layman role, not in any sort of programmer role. So it's possible that there are some changes out there, but it will not launch that. And so they would have to update or at least release some kind of a beta to do that. And they are notoriously slow over there at small cubed releasing updates. In fact, it wasn't until long after Mojave was out that we had mail suite for Mojave. So I'm hoping that they've switched things up and it's better now with Catalina and we'll see it before the release date, which is really all we can expect. We should not be expecting developers to be ready with betas, people like IMAZING already are right there. Like some folks are doing it. It depends on not only their aggressiveness with updates, but also how difficult it is with the new OS because these people just found out about it two weeks ago, just like the rest of us. So, but as long as they have it ready for release of Catalina or maybe a week or two before that, then that's a reasonable expectation. If they're later than that, then we'll ding them. But otherwise, there you go. So let's hope that mail suite is ready for Catalina. But yeah, other than not being able to use mail suite in it, I find Catalina, when I'm running it, to be very, very stable and very reliable. I haven't had any weird problems. I'm also running iPad OS 13 on my 10 and a half inch iPad. And that is equally as stable. And the browsing of like Safari is so much better. That whole thing about desktop class browsing that Apple was talking about at WWDC definitely holds true. It's a much better browsing experience on iPad OS. I have had some wonkiness with which keyboard appears at which times and sometimes something in the lower right corner looks like it's obscuring the keyboard, even though you can't see what's obscuring it. But it's beta software. So these sorts of things are expected. But other than that, iPad OS 13 works great. I do have one little rant, though, John, with iPad OS. Do you want to know what it is? Go. OK. Like I pass music files around with friends, things we've recorded, things that we have the rights to pass around with each other. And I use iCloud Music Library. I use Apple Music. But also I just play songs on my phone and my iPad. If someone emails me a song or I download a song, which I'll note, on iPad OS there's a download manager. You can save things to files, including songs. So I download a song in iPad OS, an MP3. I save it to my files app. Ain't no way to add it to the music app. Why is that? What is up with this, Apple? Why in the world can I not add songs to the music app? You talk about making the iPad not dependent on a Mac. Something as simple as adding a song to my music library. And I have to go and use my Mac to do that and then wait until it sinks via the cloud or however else I want it to sink to my iPad. It's freaking crazy. It doesn't make any sense to me why in the world I can't just add a song to my music library right there. There's no technical reason for this. There never has been one, I will point out. And there certainly isn't one now, especially with the ability to literally download a file, save it to the files app. I can do all kinds of things. I could share it to you via Slack. I could do all kinds of other things. I just can't put it in my music library. It's freaking crazy. Freaking crazy. I have no idea why. It feels like an oversight at this point, to be perfectly honest. I submitted a bug reports and feature requests are both now in the feedback assistant. And so I did submit this. So I'm not just ranting. I have submitted this presumably more as a feature request than a bug report. But it feels like a bug at this point that you can do all these things with the music file except the freaking most obvious thing, which is putting it right there, right there, my music library. I could put it in a third-party music library. If I had some third-party app or whatever, I'm sure I could do that. Yep, sweet. And it'd be great if I should check it with Spotify. Wouldn't it be ironic if I could add MP3s to my Spotify library on my phone, but not to my music library? I don't know if that's possible, but that would, it certainly seems possible. If I can add them to any other third-party app with the sharing sheet, then I can probably add it to Spotify if they make Spotify, you know, capable of receiving such things. Drives me crazy, John. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? Hello? No, I've never had that particular frustration. Okay, all right. All right, I'm gonna give you an opportunity to get a little more coffee or whatever it is. You've got about three minutes, John. Well, I talk about our next two sponsors if that's okay by you. Okay. All right, I am so stoked to have Linode on board as a sponsor for this episode, where at linode, L-I-N-O-D-E dot com slash M-G-G, you can use promo code M-G-G-2019 to get a $20 credit for this awesome service where they host whatever you want. Everything they have is native SSD Linux-based servers and you can get dedicated servers if you need that or for just as little as five bucks a month, you can get a nanode there from them that is a great way to get started and maybe is all you need. 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I'm using it, you can use it just like me, host your own VPN in the cloud, they're totally cool with it and more. Go to linode.com slash mgg, promo code mgg2019, get you a $20 credit, our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. Next up, I'd like to thank Otherworld Computing for being a sponsor of this episode. You know how much John and I love Otherworld Computing, man. This is the first place I go, really, seriously. If I need anything for my Mac, maxsales.com, that's what I type into my browser. You can do the same thing. There's nothing different about us. You just go to your browser, you type in maxsales.com, you're doing the same thing that we're doing. You're getting the same hardware and the reason I like to go with these guys is they know what they're doing. They understand the products that they're selling. They're Apple users just like us but they grok this stuff like to its core. They truly understand it all and their new Aura Pro X2 internal NVMe flash SSD, this thing's fricking amazing. Capacity up to two terabytes and crazy speeds. Read speeds over 3200 megabytes a second, megabytes. That was not, I did not misspeak. Right speeds, 2,400 megabytes per second. Totally crazy performance at awesome prices. You gotta check this out and more. Whatever you need for your Mac, this is the first place I go. Again, visit maxsales.com and our thanks to Maxsales and Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. And now to James. What do we got here? All right, James is on the hook for helping his future in-laws move from rented Comcast home network hardware to owned by them home network hardware. And he's been given pretty wide latitude to decide what that hardware should be. Nothing fancy, just a new modem and a new mesh wifi system. Their needs are modest. They have a single level home about 1,900 square feet and square-ish but by my count, they have nearly 10 devices which could be considered requiring a large amount of bandwidth, phones, computers, tablets, streaming, et cetera, gaming. And about as many low bandwidth smart home devices like doorbells and cameras and stuff. Actually, a camera may not be that very low bandwidth. That is true. And I think about it because you're streaming video. My camera, my FOSCAM cameras in the house are far and away the biggest bandwidth hogs that I have. Far and away. Yeah, good point. So there's one to three people at home at any given time and they currently have 150 megabits down but can upgrade to 250 if necessary. Current plan is to get an Eero Pro and two Eero Beacons and a surfboard, DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem. I use Velops, but the app doesn't keep me signed in reliably and is not particularly full-featured. On occasion, I've been unable to access the network because of Lynx, this is server being down. I've used a number of surfboard modems for more than a decade and never had any issue with them. I wanna pick the mesh system but it's least likely to give them any random frustrations because I don't wanna become their Comcast. I've heard consistently good things about the Eero. So I'm hoping this is a good move. Questions, is the hardware I've picked likely sufficient or do you have recommendation for another mesh system? Should I go for Eero Pros for a home of that size? They won't be connecting the extra nodes to Ethernet so I assume the benefit would be negligible. Number two, I know some of the mesh network systems have set up with a wizard that tries to help you decide our node placement. Are there any other utilities they should be equipped with on iOS or Mac? I plan on picking up a USB-C to Ethernet adapter so I can hook directly to the modem. And finally, any notes on the cable modem, spending extra money on Doxxus 3.1 doesn't make sense to me at this point given their current plan. All right, I'll give you my viewpoint and you may have something to add, Dave. Sure. I hope you do. I'm sure I got a similar, I would say a similar setup, a little smaller, but 1200 square feet, two stories. And I think about the same number of devices that he has. So I think he's got it covered. I like how he broke out the devices there and then tried to do the math here. So some of the math that I did, some of the quick math, like for example, Netflix, most Netflix clients, like if you're running it on the Tivo and you hit the info button, it'll show you the streaming rate. And at least for HD, it takes about four megabits a second. If you're talking 4K video, well, guess what, multiply that by four. So you'd need 16 megabits for each 4K stream. And I guess, keep doing the math with the higher resolutions. Yeah. And I did a quick search of how much bandwidth should you have for gaming? Just so you know, Netflix says that you need 25 megabits per second for 4K. Just... Really? Yeah, because it's just, it's not just 4K. It's 4K Ultra HD, which is UHD, that's fine. With HDR, so I think there's more data than you might be calculating. But just so you know. Yeah. Okay. They have plenty of internet bandwidth for this, just so you know. Yeah. And the same thing with gaming, the information that I could get is that, four megabits should be sufficient. So it doesn't sound like you're gonna saturate it. As for the modem, Comcast apparently is rolling out, DOCS is 3.1. That's what they call their gigabit connections, just so folks know that 3.1 is what they're using to do gigabit. Yeah, but I would concur that unless you have a very high bandwidth plan, like Dave's just mentioned, I don't think you're gonna see a benefit with a 3.1 modem. With 3.1, one thing that 3.1 does, from what I recall, and I think you found or you told us about Dave, is that it does solve the dreaded upstream buffer bloat issue. The protocol does. Even on a normal 3.0 connection, so even on your 150 megabit connection, having a 3.1 modem would solve that, you're absolutely right. Yep. Yeah. The nice thing is that the mesh vendors will also do that as well, and Eero is one of them. Yeah, not all of them, but Eero, yes, some of them, and Eero's one of them, yep. Yeah, so I'd say you should be okay with DOCS 3.0 surfboard. As for the mesh system, the first generation Eero with 3.0 nodes works fine for me, so I think it worked fine for you. The setup, I think, does the best, the setup for a lot of these things isn't a site survey, I think it's just seeing if all of the components are meshing. Can it see them, or at least that was my recollection when I set it up. It's like, okay, yeah, the one you just added is close enough. Right, but what you could do is what I just mentioned, something called a site survey, and they have a tool to do this. My favorite, haven't run on in a while, is called Netspot. Basically what it shows is the signal strength or speeds in various locations on a map, which you actually draw a little map of your house and you indicate where you are, and you say, okay, measure the stuff here, and once you're done, you get a visual map that shows you how things look. Or you could just do speed tests in various, I did the low tech, the low tech version is just do a speed test in various locations. For example, I found that I have an issue in my upstairs band room and the bandwidth was much lower, probably all the tile and stuff like that. I found in that case that an extender, which adding an extender actually increased my throughput because it was connecting to the Euro at the higher speed, five gigahertz, whereas before it was connecting at 2.4. But I could also, and actually I think I'm gonna do this, I may actually replace that thing with an Euro node. I think that would probably offer the same benefit. Oh yeah, we gotta get you another Euro node to do that just so you have this single point of management. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, yes, yeah. Yeah, all right, we should see what we can do to make that happen, that'd be good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, cool. Yeah, because putting a Gen 1 base in there, there's really not a good place to put it in that room whereas I think the node would be a little, Oh, you're talking about an Euro beacon, is that right? Or the beacon, yes. Got it, okay, so we need to get you an Euro beacon. Okay, cool, all right, let me see if we can make that happen for you, that'd be good. Yeah, you know, you know my bathroom there. It's like, you know, there's an outlet with two plugs and there's nowhere to place the Gen 1 unit or the base. Right, right, or the Gen 2 unit, I mean, which is basically the same form factor. It's a little bit bigger, I think, but basically the same thing, but still, yes, a separate power supply and device. Whereas the beacon just literally lives on the wall. The plugging it into the wall is all you do. That's 100% of it, yeah. Yeah, and then as far as administration, I think you do this for your dad, right? Is that you can remotely get in and check things out if there's trouble. Yes, yes, yeah. So that's what I gotta say about that. Okay, so I have some thoughts on all of this. I would, when you're right, that your house and it's similar to theirs, the number of devices you have is similar to theirs. One thing for all of us to think about when we're sort of specking out a system for someone else is those two factors for sure. How many devices, how big is the house, what's the layout of the house is almost more important than size or equally as important as size. But one other factor to remember is how many people? Because chances are, if you're just one person, it doesn't matter how many devices you have, you're probably not streaming to multiple devices simultaneously, right? So you're not watching three Netflix shows at the same time at your house. You would generally only be watching one. And so that is a thing to think about and mesh really does make a difference here even if you didn't necessarily need the coverage of mesh, having multiple access points running simultaneously can allow devices to get sort of, I'm using air quotes here, dedicated bandwidth for individual devices. So you're not sharing that wifi stream which can make a huge difference for people. So just remember, and I think what you're talking about with the system there is that makes perfect sense. Frankly, I think you are, your home is a little over engineered for you. You have more capacity than you need in several ways and that's in this case, not a bad thing at all. With Ethernet, there was some discussion in the question and the answer about not needing the second gen heroes because none of them would be connected to Ethernet and therefore wouldn't benefit from that. So I might actually twist that around and say because none of them will be connected to Ethernet, you might very much benefit from having Euro pros as opposed to single first gen euros or Euro beacons. And the reason is the Euro pros, the second gen Euro has three radios in it, whereas the beacon and the first gen Euro have two radios. That's the biggest difference between those devices other than form factor with the beacon as we discussed. Where that's a benefit if you don't have Ethernet is now if you're using those Euro pros, they can essentially dedicate one of those three radios to the backhaul between the Euro units and then each of them has two radios completely unencumbered by backhaul to use for what I call fronthaul, backhaul being the communication amongst the mesh itself. So amongst all the Euro devices, fronthaul is communication to all of your client devices. So having that extra radio really actually can help especially when you don't have Ethernet. So there you go. So just bear that in mind. That said, I think the Euro with two beacons set up especially if it's an Euro pro. So your main router is the Euro pro with the three radios and then two beacons from there each with two radios. That's probably gonna be enough for what you're describing here, James, but just for all of us because we try to sort of zoom out a little bit here and just make sure we see the big picture. All that set and I 100% agree with the choice to go with Euro on this. It is, you know, the Euro and plume super pods are what I would call the Cadillac of consumer grade mesh systems, but it's always really hard not to have this conversation without mentioning TP-Lynx Deco. It really is a great mesh system and it's very, very aggressively priced. The one thing that they don't have is any sort of buffer bloat protection. So, you know, for that reason alone, I still lean towards Euro. That said, when I've got a relative who says, hey, I want some mesh system, but I don't wanna spend a ton of money, TP-Lynx Deco is what they have. So I have, I think three relatives running TP-Lynx Decos and I had another three relatives slash friends running Eros too. And everybody's happy is the reality. The people that are going to be backing up a lot of things, uploading to iCloud Photo Library, like those sorts of constant upstream things, either put a DOCSIS 3.1 modem in or use some mesh system that has buffer bloat protection like Euro. But the TP-Lynx Deco stuff is really, I mean, it's really impressive. And it wouldn't, I don't know about the CPUs that they have in those things. So I don't know if they could do buffer bloat protection in the older slash current hardware, but it's worth considering. So anyway, I throw that out there. But in this scenario, especially if they are of the financial means to spend maybe an extra 100, maybe 150 bucks on a system like this, just to eliminate headache, go with Euro, 100%. Don't think about it, but just to bear in mind that TP-Lynx Deco, really, they're nipping at the heels of these in a way that competes very, very aggressively with price-wise. So there you go. Those are my thoughts. Anything more, John? We're good. Cool, E-O. All right, let's stay on Wi-Fi because Wi-Fi is fun. Corey has a question and Corey asks, he says, I have Synology's router and mesh points around the house. I need to figure out how to add one outside next to the garage so my car's parked in the driveway can access Wi-Fi. I do have a mesh point in the garage, but the signal in the driveway outside the garage is pretty weak, so it doesn't really work. So how can I weatherproof an access point and put it outside? So if I were starting from scratch, I would probably go with Ubiquiti's Unify for this. For the simple reason, so Ubiquiti's Unify is most definitely an enterprise-grade mesh system with a huge asterisk that says it's priced not terribly for the prosumer in the home. So geeks like us, Unify is a workable option. And I'll put a link to the Makikev episode where we discussed Unify initially. It only, so you can hear the explanation of how it works. It's basically an a la currently, an a la cart mesh system where you buy the router separate from the wireless access point, separate from the switch, and you sort of piecemeal it together to get exactly what you need. And what's cool about Unify is they have tons of different types, form factors, features of access points. And of course, one of them is usable outside. And so you can really kind of make, assemble the system that you want for you. They are coming out with what they call their dream machine, I think, which is an all in one, it's in beta right now, but I'll put a link to it anyway. It's an all in one router wireless access point and switch. So very similar to every other router that you would buy in a consumer scenario. And it's quite a bit cheaper than buying these things separately. So it's a night, it will be once it's out, it will be a nice entry point into this. That said, you already have a system. So again, I would kind of lean towards, you know, sort of breaking the mesh similar to what you've done at your house, John, and using a TP-Link access point to do the outdoor stuff. And they do have an AC 1200 wireless, you know, indoor outdoor access point from, and it's available for less than a hundred bucks. I think it's like $77 or something. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. And it's a, you know, AC 1200, so it's gonna do what you need. And there you go. So that's what I would go with that one. Do you have any thoughts on that, John? No, sounds good, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, you know, it gets interesting. There's no perfect way to get there. But, you know, I think this would probably get you pretty close. So anyway. Good. More on that, John? Less on that? No? Okay. Richard, while we're on the Wi-Fi thing, let's do a three for here. Richard asks, he says, I'm going on holiday soon to a remote site in Scotland that I know has a Wi-Fi connection approximately a thousand feet away, line of sight across a lake. Don't worry, it's a public connection. So if I can get connected, I won't get caught. Do you know of or have any experience of long range Wi-Fi external antennas that could pull in a weak signal from that distance? I'm looking to connect to something that will connect to my MacBook Pro. He says, a quick Amazon search pulls up some options such as the Signal King USB Wi-Fi adapter that seemed to get good reviews, but seems very inexpensive, approximately US $40 if you do the translation. He says, I was expecting to have to invest in something more advanced, possibly something from Ubiquiti or TP-Link, but I can't figure out which devices can operate as a simple directional antenna rather than anything more advanced. It's going to be a one-way arrangement, so it's not the same as setting up a point-to-point network in a large property where I could have devices at either end. He says, I don't get to control what's on the other end. I just get to control what's on my end. So, you know, the first thing is to note is that this is a pretty simple problem to solve from a physics standpoint. You just need, you know, Wi-Fi, the range that we are accustomed to with Wi-Fi is because our antennas are essentially non-directional. They are, you know, omnidirectional. And because of that, you know, they don't go all that far. They go far enough for our homes, of course, usually, or we need mesh, but Wi-Fi can go really far, like, you know, tens of miles if you focus it the right way. So, a dish aimed in the right direction that can capture a signal is really what you need, and that might be why you're finding this stuff relatively inexpensive. It's obviously better if that signal on the other side of the lake is also directional and aimed at you, right? So you're not just trying to grab something that's coming from a much weaker signal, but even without that, it's usually doable. So it's possible that signal king will do it or, you know, something like it. Reviews on the one that I found for that signal king, it's questionable at best. So, with that in mind, Ubiquiti has two things that seem like they might do it for you. The light beam or power beam. And I'll put links to both of those, but that's not gonna be inexpensive equipment. So that might not go the right route. That said, you know, kind of searching around and hunting a little bit. I did find on Amazon, of course, of all places, but a simple Wi-Fi, ultra long range Wi-Fi extender directional parabolic grid outdoor antenna for a hundred bucks. So this is just a Wi-Fi antenna. You would plug it in to your router or whatever that would need to have a removable antenna connection, which you might have. Like those definitely exist. You know, we'd see them all the time and you just plug in and use that as your antenna. And in theory, good to go. So, you know, those are my thoughts on this, but it is a relatively easy problem to solve. I have seen people solve this with homemade, like, you know, garbage can dishes and things like that, like for $12 and, you know, some solder or whatever. So it really just is an antenna problem. John, you've done crazy things like this. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I did. I think I still have it. Yeah, I was playing around with that at 1.2. Lucent made a range extending antenna. I think I still have it. What I was looking up, though, there's another suggestion. I don't know if you recall this, but they call it a can-tenna because you make it out of a Pringles can. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, I'm trying to... Yeah, and it looks like it's pretty inexpensive to make, but not getting good information on how far people are able to go with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, all very doable. That's crazy. I'm looking at somebody. Yeah, somebody just used a tripod and a BNC connector and some tape. I mean, this really is like a MacGyver solution here. And with the tripod, you can, you know, fix the location and aim it. And good to go. Can-tenna. I love it. Yeah. Yeah, let's see here. Actually, I see there's a YouTube video where somebody said they got 600 feet. I don't know. All right. So, you know, but 600 feet, you know, across a lake, you have zero interference, like nothing. So you might get more than 600 feet. You know, yeah. So that's pretty good. I like this. This is good. I want to hear back. Please keep us posted, Richard, with what you choose to do and what you, you know, what your success looks like, because this is interesting, fun stuff. Like I said, I think I talked about it a couple of years ago. My uncle built some, you know, cheap little dish antennas that he just plugged into some $20, you know, TP-Link or D-Link. I think it was some D-Link routers, like old D-Link routers. And he was like, yeah, it works fine. He just has to occasionally go and cut holes in the trees, you know, cut the right branches so that he has a line of sight. And then it works great. And he's got his connection between his two houses across the street from each other so he can save the, whatever, 40 bucks a month on his wifi, that one of them. So smart, smart. All right, where are we here? Oh, we have all kinds of other questions. You know, we actually had an important one from Steven. He messaged us on Twitter. He says, I was listening to last week's episode, you mentioned you got a new Synology. You also mentioned that you got some of those new Iron Wolf SSDs, but you didn't specify whether you bought the products or were sent the review units free of charge. Sometimes you specify, but sometimes I'm pretty sure they're review units, but you didn't exactly say, he says, I trust your opinions on these products and knowing if they're free review units or if you paid for them is helpful in framing my thinking. And you're totally right. That's a great question. And we do try to specify this stuff, but we also try not to make a huge deal out of it because that distracts from what we're actually trying to do here, which is tell you about things that we really think are worthwhile. So let me say this, regardless of how we procured an item, we will never mention it on the show if it isn't something that we would buy to use ourselves or if we do mention it on the show and it's not something we would buy to use ourselves, we say that. Now, there are also things like that we mentioned and cool stuff found that come from you or that we've seen elsewhere that we haven't used. And of course, we didn't pay for them, nor have we gotten them for free. They are just things in existence out there. Our offices are filled with stuff that we test and ignore. For example, I have the Asus Lyra Mesh System that they sent me for review, I did not pay for it, nor would I, given the way it currently works. It's janky and clunky and not at all something I would even recommend, frankly, even if you could get it for free, it doesn't work all that well. But I've never mentioned it, right? And for good reason. So now, hopefully that explains what we do here. It really is, would we buy it? Would we use it? And if so, then yeah, then there it is. But we'll try to be more diligent about that without completely changing the focus of the show. So to answer your question specifically, yeah, both the DS1019 Plus and the Iron Wolf SSDs are review units. And for what I'm using them for, I would very happily purchase them. That 1019 Plus is the best distation for home slash prosumer use right now. It's the perfect blend of capabilities and budget consciousness, right? So they put exactly the right CPU in there that they needed without over-engineering it too much, you know, so that you're not paying for something you're not using. And they did that by baking in the hardware transcoding for the videos so you don't need extra CPU to do it in software. It really is a fantastic unit. And I'm stoked that it exists. When they called me, you know, before it was out, they said, can we send you one of these and test it? I was like, whoa, wait a minute, what is this thing? Yeah, definitely. This is what we've been looking for for like the last two years. So yes, absolutely. But we'll be, it's a great question. And thank you for asking, Stephen, it's always good. So feel free to ask. You know, that's, you know, that we answer every email that we get, or at least we try to. And we also try to put links to everything that we have in the show notes. And then you can sign up to get the show notes delivered to your email box. Just go to macgeekyub.com, put your email address into the little subscribe box right there in the middle of the page. And boom, you will get the show notes for every episode from then forward delivered to your email box so that you don't have to remember to go back to macgeekyub to click on the links and all that stuff. And I will say this, and thank you to everyone who has been doing this. But, you know, we always say that, especially with our sponsors, it is our job to get you to encourage you to visit them, right? Whether you buy or not is between you and them. That's just how that works, right? We're not involved in that process. But we're here to, you know, wet your appetite for lack of a more succinct phrase or maybe that is a succinct phrase. So, and in the way that you can show that we wet your appetite is by visiting our sponsors. Well, good news. All those links are right there in the email you get from the show notes. So that truly does help us out if you go and visit them and show that, you know, we got you to express some interest that actually really helps quite a bit. So you've got those links right there too. You don't have to remember to do it. That's great. All right, John. Any thoughts on any of this stuff? The review stuff, the newsletter, all that good stuff, anything? I actually laid down some of my own coin for an iron wolf drive when I had another drive in one of my raised die. Yeah. I mean, they're competitively priced and they offer extra goods. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah, I would, I'm trying to think, I think I did the same thing because they had sent me a couple of iron wolf drives for review for free. And then when I needed to expand beyond that, yeah, I bought some 10 terabytes a year or two ago. Yeah, without even flinching. I mean, it's like I said, we, you know, we recommend them here because that's what we would use or that's what we do use. So there you go. Yeah. When we were there, that they actually were. At PEPCOM, you mean? Yeah, at PEPCOM. I saw, I think they're largest now is 18 terabyte. 16. Or 16. Yeah. No, I think it was 18. Do they? I'm pretty sure they had an 18 there. Really? That's crazy. Yeah, but, you know, maybe it was a mock-up or something. But, you know, the guy was like, do you want one? And I'm like, honestly, you've been so good to us that I'm like, you know what? Honestly, I have enough storage. I don't need more. Yeah. 16 is the largest that the Iron Wolf and Iron Wolf pros come in. But it's just what they had there was the 16. Yeah. But still, I mean, it's crazy. Yeah. Sam, I think WD guys had 14. They were showing a 14. So they just keep getting bigger. Yeah. And the WD guys had a sand disk. I posted a picture of this on Instagram, which I will link here. I think I also posted it on Twitter. But a one terabyte micro SD card, like this thing was smaller than my thumbnail and holds a terabyte. I don't know how much it is. They didn't know how much it was going to sell for either. They kind of had it in this like, you know, a Lucite cube or whatever is a display. But man, like crazy, crazy. So anyway, you know, fun. Do we have anything else to talk about? You know, I, we are almost at the end here, but I wanted to mention one thing and answer Rob's question, especially as people are traveling. So let's see if we can do this quickly here. And hopefully it works. Well, okay, there we are. Great. Rob asks, he said, I just listened to 765, Mac Geekib 765 and caught your explanation of how you leveraged the dual SIM functionality of your iPhone 10R on AT&T and added data only service from GigSky. He says, like you, I have a 10R and I happen to have it on AT&T through my employer. I was issued the phone before dual SIM functionality was enabled in a subsequent update. So that means my service with AT&T resides on a physical SIM in the device. Exactly what I've got. Leaving my eSIM free, he says. At first I was going to pursue getting my AT&T account provisioned and switched. So it was on the eSIM, leaving me to swap a physical SIM in as needed. He says, however, after listening to your explanation and experience, it occurred to me, I might actually be in a better position if I leave the eSIM slot free so that I can switch between data providers at will without the delay of getting or waiting for a physical SIM. I can only assume this is the method that you employed for WWDC, Dave, but I don't believe you actually clarified that point. Could you please? I assume you use the GigSky app to activate the eSIM in your 10R and will quote unquote replace that with another provider at a later date as necessary. Yeah, that is absolutely what I did. And I'm really glad you asked this question because that's how that works. I left my AT&T stuff on the SIM and was able to at will just launch the app. Which is why I said in the prior episode where we talked about this, go get all those apps, the GigSky app, the TruePhone app, and there's a couple others that I can't remember off the top of my head so that they're on your phone so you can go and provision your eSIM without even needing to go to the app store to download these apps. You just can keep them there and you're good to go. So yes, that is exactly what I did and that's a great question. So thanks for asking, Rob. Good stuff. Thoughts on that, John? No. Okay. Craig had one little tip. He said regarding the GigSky and eSIMs, he said recently, or he says here in Australia, our carriers don't support eSIM so I have a physical SIM for my primary account and the eSIM is empty. So similar to the rest of us. He says, I was going to Hong Kong for a getaway with some friends and was looking at getting a SIM for my time there as I usually do for travel. After hearing you talk of using eSIM, I thought I would try it out. I downloaded the GigSky and my TruePhone apps and looked through the plans they offered as I was also doing a day trip to China I wanted to plan that would work whilst I was there. The plan with GigSky did that. So it was the one I went with. It was easy to set up beforehand and once I landed I flipped on the data plan and was online before I got off the plane. They worked easily throughout Hong Kong and my China trip and I will use it again. There were however two small issues I wanted to share. The first was minor. My data plan ran out on the last day with no warning. I hit my two gig limit and it just stopped. It took me a while to figure out why my Instagram wasn't uploading. As I was out and about, I had to get hotspotted to add data and keep going. No big deal, but it would have been nice to get some kind of alert so I didn't get caught. The other issue was speed. I had assumed that because of the population density of Hong Kong that coverage and therefore speed would be good. However, it was slow in comparison to what I usually get here at home. Pings were like 500 milliseconds or above and download speeds of 25 megabits. He said functional but noticeable. On the whole it worked and I will definitely be doing the same on an upcoming trip to Singapore. So yeah, I have to chuckle a little because your 500 millisecond pings are pretty high. 25 megabits per second for downloads is faster than I get with AT&T and I think faster than you get with Verizon, John. So here in the States, we would be quite happy to get that at least in rural areas. I think in cities you might be able to do a little better but AT&T and Verizon aren't all that great in our little rural areas for speed. Coverage, fine. Speed, acceptable. But you know, I get like with AT&T I get like three to six maybe in generally speaking. And I think you were saying that's what you get with Verizon, right, John? Typically under 10. Yeah, okay, right, right, right. Another service though, I... No, no, we're gonna wait. We're not talking about that yet. Yep, we always gotta leave them wanting a little bit more. So we will do that. Right, I knew you were gonna defer that. Just wanted to keep it on your radar. Of course, of course, yeah. Yeah, we've got all kinds of good stuff to tell you but we are done with time for today. So that's where we go. It is time to say thank you for listening, for sending in all your questions for really, for everything. I wanna thank everybody in the chat room for helping us with the links and the show notes and helping keep us on track and reminding us if we, or alerting us if we perhaps skipped something or missed something, it's awesome. And if you ever wanna join the chat room, of course, MackieCubb.com slash stream is where you can go for that. I will say thank you for all the iTunes reviews and I changed while I added a link. So MackieCubb slash iTunes used to get you to the place where we can get you for iTunes reviews. Well, iTunes is sort of going away, so I changed that. And now you can go to MackieCubb.com slash reviews and that will direct you to where you can help leave us reviews and help us. So there you go. Let's see. We mentioned email, if you're a premium subscriber, premium at MackieCubb.com, I think that's enough. We've asked enough of you. We try to deliver more than we request, but you know, it's all good. It's an exchange of energy and information and all of that stuff and it's been working pretty well for 14 years. So thank you. Thanks to Cashfly at cashfly.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to all of our great sponsors. Of course, Linode at linode.com slash mgg coupon code mgg2019 for 20 bucks off. Otherworld computing at maxsales.com, Experian Boost at Experian.com slash mgg. It's free. Go do it. And LinkedIn job to get 50 bucks off at LinkedIn.com slash mgg. Well, thanks to everybody. My thanks to you, John, for hosting me this week. It was good to see you. Oh yeah. Yeah, man. Fun stuff. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, man. All right. Thanks everybody. See you next time. Hey, John. Got any advice for anybody? Lasting advice? I mean, I know we just spent 90 minutes giving advice. Anything left in the tank? Oh, let me see. Oh yeah, I still got some coffee left. That's good. I got a tank of coffee today. No. Um, yeah. The only advice I can give you all is, don't get caught. Made up.