 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gab, episode 741 for Monday, December 24th, 2018. Thanks, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, all the great stuff that you send in, plus some things that we might find during the week. We mix it all together. We answer your questions. We share your tips and the cool stuff found. We provide some color of our own, if you will. To mix it all together and make it interesting and fun and all of that good stuff with the primary goal, the prime directive, if I may, being that we each learn five new things every single time we get together. It doesn't have to be only five, though. It can be at least five. Let's just, we don't want to be crazy about this. We don't want you feeling like you have to press pause the moment you hit number five, right? Sponsors for this episode include Ops Genie now from Atlassian. We'll talk more about that at OpsGenie.com in a moment. For now, here, Happy Christmas Eve from Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in peripheral Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. Hey, John F. Brown. So happy Christmas Eve to you. But I can also say, because we are recording this a day earlier than we're releasing it, I get to say something that I perhaps like to say even more, which is Happy Festivus, my friend. So there you go. Yeah, there was an airing of the grievances earlier. We did. We had an airing of the grievances in the chat room earlier. And I had to go sit in the corner for a minute after that. Because I think I went a little overboard with the airing of my own grievances. And now I'm drinking tension tamer tea. So hopefully that's the right thing to drink after the airing of the grievances. Don't you? Indeed. I'm just having coffee. Oh, boy, caffeine. That's me and caffeine. Like it's a it's a delicate balance. I, you know, regularly regularly. No, no, no, no, no. Let us start here. Shall we with something actually from the Mac Geekab forums, John? Where it really it's there's nothing really to read here, although I guess we can go through it a little bit. Someone in the forums, Ari, actually, posted a thing having issues with messages where messages weren't coming in right or was using a lot of CPU and and contact like the some messages would be come, you know, come in out of order and some messages maybe wouldn't be assigned to the, you know, the contact. You just see a phone number on one device versus the other. And really what this brings up, John, is that contacts are the root of all evil. It really is. I'm finding more and more on both iOS and on Mac OS and perhaps more so on Mac OS that contacts, if you have too many of them and I don't know what that number is, but I think it's more than maybe six. It really like I guess we're starting with we're we're airing some more grievances is what we're doing here, folks. But like I'm finding that so many problems like I'll see processes running and it won't just be obvious things like address book sync, but sometimes even calendar sync has to do with contacts if you take a look. So you can there's going to be a bunch of tips here as I'm just ranting about this this morning. But if you run Activity Monitor and you find a process that's, you know, any process, but for me, you know, I usually look in there when there's one that's sort of running a muck and, you know, I've seen it where calendar sync is running a muck. And if you double click on it inside Activity Monitor, you can see open files and ports as one of the tabs across the top. You can see this for any process that's not owned specifically by root in order to see those. You get a sudo to run Activity Monitor, but otherwise you can see them and it will change in real time, which is very cool. But if you scroll to the end, that's usually like the beginning is all the setup stuff in the core files for the application and all those. At the end are the like the files that it's actually touching on the disk. And I've seen Calendar Store going after, you know, things in contacts too. And it just seems like any time I make a change to contacts, even unlike my iMac in the office, which is a, you know, four core, four gigahertz i7 processor, I can watch the cores heat up while it just processes like one little change to contacts. And and that's what, you know, Ari was finding too. And we had a long chat in the in the. You know, in the forums there and and he's he found it, you know, disabling contact syncing suddenly solved it or someone found that. I don't want to read while I'm talking here. But but yeah, you know, and and contact syncing got worse with messages in the cloud because I guess there's more to it there. I just I feel like contacts is built for less contacts than certainly than I have and and certainly, you know, many of you have too. So it's just it's I wanted to I don't have any magic answers, although disabling contact syncing, re-enabling it, those types of things. One other thing to do is if you're well, you know us, we like to back up, right, John, before we do anything that might lose data. And certainly if you've got your clones going or your time machine backups going, you will have backups of your contacts, but they're not super easy to slurp back into your Mac. The best way to back up your contacts is to run the contacts app. Go to file and choose export and choose contacts archive. And that way it will just save an easily easily importable contacts archive separate so that anything, excuse me, anything you do with syncing and changing things and maybe even deleting your contacts and re-importing it anyway, sort of wipe out and start from scratch. You can have this pristine untouched, you know, version of them there. So any thoughts about this, John? I didn't really prep you for the rent I was going to give. So I don't know if you we haven't. I fortunately have about this. So I fortunately have not been haunted by problems and contacts. That's good. I don't know. I mean, I've been looking at them lately. How many contacts do you have? I have I have over three hundred. OK, seven hundred thirty. I have thirty nine in that because if I open contacts, it doesn't show how many there are. Well, you know what you do is you list them and then you highlight them all and it'll tell you how many. Oh, there's another way. I go in. I don't see it on the screen immediately. But when you do that, it says, oh, well, you selected seven hundred thirty cards. Sure. Contacts. So in Contacts, I in the in the view menu, I always choose show groups. Because that way I can I mean, if I have groups, which I do, I can see. But you can also see which account your contacts are part of. And and if you choose all contacts, you know, you can see everything. And then, you know, all iCloud is just iCloud. And if you have a Google account or whatever. But if you scroll down in to all the way to the bottom of your list of contacts, it'll tell you how many you have. Yeah. So maybe my problem is I have too many. I've got, you know, thirty nine ninety nine contacts or something. But it's like so. Shouldn't be a problem. I've had them cause issues with syncing to my Apple Watch. So maybe I do need to go through. Maybe Apple's just not, you know, I'm curious. For those of you that have issues with contacts, how many you have? Or those of you that don't have issues with contacts, tell us how many you have. You can chime in on this forum thread. The link will be at Mackeycap.com. You can email us at feedback at Mackeycap.com to love to hear from you, as always, with everything. So I don't know if I quite heard that. I thought you said feedback at Mackeycap.com. Right. I said feedback at Mackeycap.com. That is correct. Thank goodness. Thank goodness. Yeah. No kidding. So yeah, contacts are the root of all evil. It's I and I've seen it like on on my older Macs that, you know, are running like still El Capitan or whatever, the ones that can't even run like Sierras, I've I find that, you know, their CPUs are constantly chewed up by these, you know, by whatever it decides to do. It's either contacts or it's doing something with my photos library, because as we've ranted about before Apple in their infinite wisdom, perhaps waving the flag of security, although I don't believe it. I don't believe it applies in this case. Does all the photo processing locally on the device, right? And so that means that all of your devices get to process all of your photos, which is really cool. It's one of my favorite things to have have CPUs to double work when it could can't they do it? Why can't they do it? Could be done in the cloud that your photos are stored in the cloud. So I don't see what the security issue is. I mean, they're already there. Everybody else does it in the cloud seems to work really well. My sonology does it in, you know, the cloud works great. No problem. Yep. And that's a, you know, like my sonology is slower than yours, right? It doesn't have the BV CPU that you've got in mind still. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've got I mean, it's not that much slower, but it's a little slower. You know, you got that new what it's the 918 plus you have. That things that things nice like that. All right. More on this. I have one comment from Sandy about this if we want to go to that. All right. Cool. So to be somewhat helpful here, Sandy was having problems with contacts. And she said that they would not sync with iCloud. She was just having all sorts of issues. And we went back and forth on it. And she says, I signed out of my Gmail account with contacts and boom, everything started syncing. So there you go. So syncing to Gmail seems to have been causing it not to consistently sync to iCloud. Maybe it was having maybe there was something wrong with with one of the contacts for Gmail and so it was never getting around to doing the next sync. Maybe it's serialized and not paralyzed. I don't know. Meaning serialized meaning things happen in order as opposed to at the same time. One at a time versus the same time. I don't know. So I'm curious, you know, but it was just an interesting thing that she sent that in. So I figured I would share that too. Well, we're talking about contacts and all that good stuff. Mr. Braun. Mm hmm. Any more thoughts on this before we pretend like we're going to leave contacts behind and not rant about it occasionally throughout the rest of the episode? We're good. I have I have no beef with my contacts. Cool, yeah. All right, a nice tip. We have a bunch of tips, actually, a nice tip from the forums. Mike Price posted, he said, I figured I'd share this in case anyone else runs into this not so helpful error message. So I recently recently purchased a 2018 Mac mini to replace my mid 2010 MacBook Pro for the last year or so. And he talks about how his MacBook Pro had some issues. And he said. Oh, it's the thing he says, but that the I'm trying to get there for you. Sorry. Oh, yeah. He was trying to install high Sierra on the MacBook Pro as a clean install after he replaced this and he kept running into an error that said this copy of the install Mac OS high Sierra app application is damaged and cannot be used to install Mac OS. So I recreated the bootable image a few times. And even when went so far as to download a fresh copy of 1013.6 and use that, they all gave the exact same error. Then with a little Google food, the problem became clear. He says, as I hinted above, I needed to crack open the laptop to perform the hard drive dance. He took the hard drive out, put it back in. He says, in doing so and following I fix its directions, I disconnected the battery. When I put it back together, everything worked. But without power for 20 minutes or so. And with a dead CMOS battery, if it's still called a CMOS battery, the computer thought it was 2001 and my install was coming from the future. He says, so the key validation or the certificate validation on the installer was failing because it was not correct in terms of the dates. Reset the time to today, the install ran fine. He says, but that error, well, correct was not helpful. So very cool. Thank you for sharing that with us. It's important to remember, you know, it used to be so common that we ran into these clock issues in the pre-internet connected computer days because our computers were not always weren't syncing with any external time source when he had to set our computer's clocks manually. And they would drift or, you know, in this case, like if the battery died, it would just reset and there was nothing to automatically change that. Now, if his computer had gotten online, it would have fixed that instantly, right, and might not have even noticed it. But because he did the hard drive dance, there was nothing to boot from. And so it couldn't get up that one time to sync, you know, to log into his previously set internet connections and Wi-Fi and all that and and take care of it. So it used to be really commonplace anytime you had a problem. Like the first thing you'd check is like, I wait, is the date wrong? Now it happens so infrequently because our computers set their time that it's easy to forget that. So thank you for the reminder, Mike Price. Very good stuff. Thoughts on that, John? Not a very good error message. Well, most error messages aren't very good. That's, you know, that's kind of how things go. The error should have been like, you know, I think the time and date is wrong. Can you check that out? Yeah, right, right. Like that would be helpful. Yeah, exactly. It's crazy. Yeah, yeah. All right. Funny what came up is I would have expected 1970 to come up, right? Yeah, I wonder if the beginning of time for Unix, most Unix, some Unix. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I wonder maybe maybe that particular Mac resets in a different way. Huh? Good question. If you'd let us know, if you know, let us know. All right. Larry has a quick bit of info about a bug. He said regarding amazing. He says I had an iPhone 7 Plus and was upgrading to a 10S Max. I decided to use iMazing's handy dandy device to device transfer. After letting it go all night, I was shocked to see that a good percentage of my apps didn't transfer. When I had time, I just scrapped that and did an iCloud restore. I wrote to DigiDNA, the folks who make iMazing for support. And at first they tried to place blame on the apps not being available in the app store. They went through and through. They thought maybe it was 64 bit apps and things like that. And Larry said then I trusted my gut and my hunch was that since I was using Apple's space saving setting to unload or to offload unused apps, that maybe there was no physical app on my phone to be transferred. Bingo, that's definitely it. And as of earlier this week, iMazing would not do transfers, device to device transfers of apps that are have been auto offloaded by your phone. So they are now aware of it and fixing it. But for anybody that's getting a new phone over the holidays or helping people with a new one, bear that in mind as you as you move forward. Of course, offloaded apps generally are offloaded because they're unused. So maybe this is a nice way to auto prune those things you weren't using. You know, unintentionally, of course. But, you know, maybe who knows, maybe it's the way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Any thoughts on that before we go to the next tip here? No. No. OK. Interesting find. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. It is a good find. I agree. Another good find. In regards to our conversation last week, John, about disk space being taken up and being attributed to the system folder or system section, not the system folder, we had quite a few responses about this. And one of them was from listener Brian. Who said in Reddit is loaded with users complaining about disk capacity issues. And he says, and as you discussed, it's often related to time machine slices. But he says, here's a post from yesterday pointing to another possible cause. And that is the cores folder. So in Unix, when the system has a problem, and I'll leave it at that, it can some. Yeah, it can sometimes choose to dump the memory that contained the operating system core out to a file. I'm oversimplifying, but that's essentially what happens. And those files, depending on how much RAM you have and how big your OS is, can be pretty darn big and can fill up your drive pretty quickly. And so people have been finding these core dumps being non pruned on their max. And the way you can find these is in the finder, go to the Go menu, choose Go to folder and type in slash. So that's the one next to the right shift key on most US keyboards, slash. And then cores all lowercase, C-O-R-E-S. And that will bring up a folder if it says that it has zero items in it. Cool. If it doesn't say that it has zero items, i.e. if it has things in here and you are not a developer of Mac OS, then these files are probably not helpful to you unless you're sharing things with an Apple support rep or an engineer. And you can go ahead and delete them and that might free up some space. So another just another thing. Thank you for sharing that, Brian. Very good stuff. Did you ever did you ever find yours, John? Yes. OK. And I don't know how. Awesome. That's even better. Some people some people suggest the turn off time machine. So I did that. Right. But the local snapshots were still there. So I manually deleted them, which you can do with TM, you tell. Oh, then I then I said, hmm, you know what? Yeah, I mean, it's not that bad. I mean, you can do it through Carbon Copy Clone or as well. Sure. Let's see. So yeah, I don't think it's a big deal, but they don't take up a lot of space as shows and the snapshots take up, you know, maybe hundreds of K tens or hundreds of K. I mean, it's not it's not the whole drive. So I didn't think that was it. But so I deleted those and then I'm like, you know what? I should do a Carbon Copy Clone or backup to my external drive. And I did that. And when I did that, it started freeing up space. It showed more free space on that because it was realizing the changes that I made in. Yeah, sure. Sure. That makes sense. Right. Well, and I'm like, OK, well, you know what? Why don't I just do a final backup and then boot that drive and then use that drive instead? You know, there's something screwed up on the other one. I did that. And then all of a sudden, my previous external backup drive showed that it had like 600 gigs taken up for the system category as well. It's like, but then I looked at my internal drive and all of a sudden the space had been freed on that. I don't know what triggered it. All of a sudden releasing that space. Maybe turning off time machine and turning it back on did that. But it took it. Did it not happen instantly? Right. The things I need to know. It doesn't show the thing is in the in the finder, you can look at details of certain categories. But the only system it shows is the amount of space that it thinks something system is taking up, it doesn't tell you what. Right. And I was never able to find what it was. I don't think. I can't imagine it was just time machine. That is the most common thing for that leads to and also solves this issue is time machine. So it's possible that it just needed to do some, you know, purging, right? Because when you even even and this goes deeper than the finder usually shows, but even when you delete a file, if there's not a purge issued, it doesn't actually delete it. Right. You know, so I don't. Could have been those and when I, you know, when I booted from another drive or something, it just it did a cleanup on boot or something. Yeah. I mean, the other thing I was thinking of doing was reinstalling the OS from recovery. And I think when you do that, that also resets certain things, I think. Yeah. Or just booting in safe mode. I wonder if that would have, had you tried that? Because that does a lot of cleaning stuff, too. Yeah. So it's a it's a mysterious problem. I'm not the only one that has I mean, some people are like, oh, well, you know, it's taking up a couple of megabytes. I'm like, well, yeah, that's the, you know, my case, it was taking up hundreds of gigabytes and I was running out of space. Yeah, it's bad. And like. So. All right. Also in show seven forty, we were talking about stopping the notifications to upgrade to Mojave, especially on those computers where the hardware would not allow that. So that's really annoying. And Ev the nerd wrote in with an article actually over on OS 10 daily or OS X daily about how to stop this. And it involves deleting the OS notification bundle from library bundles and then also launching a terminal app that says ignore those particular things for it for just the GM of the Mac OS installer, which is great, because if you're running Sierra or, you know, what you call it, like a copy ton or something, you're not going to get an update like those are over. So yeah, this is good. This is good. Thanks for sharing that, Ev the nerd. Much appreciated. All right. And then going back a couple shows, but this was there was some interesting stuff here, John, listener Thomas wrote, and since I listened to Mac, you get up seven thirty eight and have two follow ups. We were talking about M.D.M. Mobile Device Management, where you can control settings on devices remotely. Like, you know, we talk about when Jamf Jamf now is our sponsor. He says to the M.D.M. problem from Ken, you describe the normal enrollment process, but Ken asks how to use the supervised mode. I don't think that Ken really used this feature, but for completion, there's an article from Simple M.D.M. that we'll put in the show notes. That's just another M.D.M. service. There are many. He says that describes the features and the process really well. So there is I had no idea. And this is why I think I completely missed this when we originally talked about it, is because I had no idea that there was something called supervised mode and supervised mode or supervision, as this article says, was introduced by Apple way back in iOS 5 as a special mode that gives M.D.M. administrators even more control of a device than typically permitted. It's intended to be used on devices that are like institutionally owned, where you can set up things like single app mode and web content filters and silent app pushes and like always on VPN and things like that. So if you have a device that's operating in like kiosk mode, right, you might want to like really lock that thing down. And that's what this supervised mode is about. So we'll put a link in the show notes about that because that's actually kind of a cool thing to know about and know that it it exists. And and then he had a note also, Thomas did he says to Dominic's tip about Mojave snapshots, he says, you can always take snapshots of your hard disk or SSD with the command TMU till space snapshot from the terminal. This snapshot you can restore with time machine and recovery mode. You do not use any additional drives for that. It's extremely helpful for testing software. And he says you can also open terminal. Here's a good tip at the very first start of a Mac in the first setup with the command control option command T. So if you want to open terminal while the Mac OS installers first screen is up, control option command T. So there you go. Thank you for for all of that, Thomas. Anything any thoughts on any of that, Mr. Braun? The last thing about the MDM, just to add on to that, I noticed that the other day I was running OS 10 server, which now only does profiles for devices. But a lot of the settings for individual devices, it'll actually explicitly say, oh, supervised mode only, let's accept this setting. And you're right. Yeah. So it's much you get much more control. If a device is in that mode, which could be good, depending on your. Yeah, your use case. Yeah. How heavy handed you want to be with administration? Right. No, that's what it that's what it seems to be for. If you need a really heavy hand, that's right. Yep. All right. And then Keith wrote in recently and said, you were talking about cleaning the icon cash over the earlier in the fall. And he said, and it reminded me of an article I wrote on my blog last year about cash, a cash in Mac OS that just keeps growing. So this is a tip for anyone who uses WhatsApp with the iCloud backup enabled. WhatsApp create WhatsApp is a messenger app that's used somewhat in the US and pretty much everywhere else worldwide. It's super handy. It says WhatsApp creates a cash folder and doesn't clean it up properly. It can get huge. He says, I've seen mine at over 50 gigs. And his blog talks blog post talks about how to clean that up. And of course, we'll put we'll put a link to Keith's blog in the show notes here. It says you might be want something you want to share with your listeners. And if either of you use WhatsApp with iCloud backup enabled, it'll be interesting to see how much space you can free by deleting the cash. Yeah, I got to check this out. I I used WhatsApp quite a bit when we traveled in Europe to talk with our Airbnb hosts, and I still use it occasionally to talk to some friends, but not as regularly as as many of you do, I'm sure. But but yeah, pretty cool. So thanks for sharing that, Keith, handy, handy stuff. You use WhatsApp at all, John. Isn't it doesn't it sound like secret messages here? You are encrypted encrypted messages. And yeah, yeah, yeah, it can. Yeah. Yeah, I thought that's I mean, it's like iMessage, but it's it's cross platform, right, is is kind of the way it works because it your messaging platform. Well, and data based messaging, not, you know, not SMS, right? Yep. Yep. Yep. Cool. Another good little tip from listener David. He says, if you are a premium Plex subscriber, so a Plex pass subscriber, you get what are called Plex perks. This isn't this is tough to say here, John, with all the peace. He says a current Plex perk is 20 percent off Western Digital's website. This is great for red NAS hard drives. If you're in the market for one or anything else, they sell on the regular website, but just remember this is a one time use only code that you will get. So choose wisely when you're going to use it and don't get caught. So thank you for for sharing that, David. That's awesome. Yeah. I had no idea that Plex perks was even a thing and I've been a Plex pass member for as long as I could possibly remember. So I will we will put a link to that in the show notes for sure. Pretty good. Mr. Braun, good stuff. There are new dates coming for the Mac Tech conference. It was it was supposed to be in November, like mid November, the week of the 15th or something like that. And evidently, that was going to conflict with Jamps Jamps Conference. And so they have moved Mac Tech Conference a month earlier. So it's now happening the week of October 14th, which in October 14th is the Monday, I think Mac Tech officially starts that Wednesday. There's some stuff on Tuesday as well. But just for every anyone that hadn't seen this just happened just before the weekend, so it's easy to have missed. So I wanted to let you know because I know we've got a lot of Mac Tech attendees that listen. So I will hopefully be making it. October is a tough month for me to travel, but but it was definitely worth my while this year as I as I mentioned after I got back. So I'm going to make I'm going to do everything I can to make it there. I think you would love Mac Tech, John. It's yeah, check it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold the dates. All right. Speaking of dates, Mr. Braun, we here at Mac Observer have a bit of an anniversary that's coming up this week on the 28th of December. We will have been the Mac Observer for exactly 20 years. That was the day that we changed from Wabintosh to the Mac Observer. And as I was talking with someone this week, I mentioned it and they're like, wow, what made you launch a business like in the middle of the holiday season right before the New Year? I was like, what did make us launch a business? Like, what was our what were we thinking? The reality is that we were acquiring a website called Wabintosh and that process started much earlier in the fall. We realized through that process, through something that I now I didn't know what we were doing back then. We still don't know what we're doing. But I through the process that is generally called due diligence where you find out all the things that you need to know before you pull the trigger on acquiring a business, we realized that they did not own the domain Wabintosh dot com. So that was interesting. So we Brian Chaffin and I came up with a bunch of different names. And obviously we we decided that Mac Observer was the right name to change it to. And we did that. But we wanted to have it all done in in place before Mac World Expo so that we could have the Mac Observer have a press presence there and have all of our content come from the Mac Observer so that we were working hard on branding our new name right away. You know, essentially what was the biggest event of the year for our audience at that time. So that's why we pulled that trigger. And sure enough, John, you and I went to that Mac World Expo as representatives of the Mac Observer and covered it and got press passes and all that good stuff for the very first time. So so happy upcoming anniversary, my friend. Pretty good stuff. Yeah, it was pretty exciting. It's not everybody got it. Not everybody. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, it could be denied. That's right. Yeah, that's right. We got to go to the Steve Jobs keynote. That was that was. Oh, no, that was not. We did not go to that keynote as press. I don't know why we didn't. I think we had already booked our trip. Like you and I used to go to Mac World Expo as just fans, right? I say just fans as fans, right? We just went as attendees and we already had our trip booked. And I think we had decided not to get there in time to do the keynote. I don't know what whatever it was, but but we did not attend that keynote because the first one we attended was the one in New York that following year, which was the one that that Bill Gates. No, no, no, that wasn't Bill. We never we weren't at the one for Bill Gates. The Bill Gates one was the prior year and we were in Boston for it, but we listened to it on real audio from our hotel room over a dial up connection. I just remember people howling when they saw. Right. Yeah. No, the first keynote we saw if memory serves was the one where Noah Wiley came out on stage acting as Steve Jobs. And then, you know, five minutes in Steve came out and, you know, took over took over the reins. So yeah, yeah, good stuff. All right. And a tip that came up this week sort of accidentally was a tip that was part of a rant. But if you don't know this, then it would be good to know. In mail on iOS, there's a little button down in the lower left hand corner that looks like, you know, a tapering hamburger menu. I'll call it, but it's just like three things in a circle. Three lines in a circle. If you hit that, it turns on the filter for that mailbox. You can configure what that filter is. I think by default, it is to filter unread messages, but you can see what it's filtering at the bottom right next to that sort of in the center. It will say filtered by and on my phone, it says unread. Well, if you tap that unread, you can choose to filter by unread, flagged, to me, CC me, only mail with attachments, only from VIPs or whatever else. Well, that's really it. I was going to say whatever else you like, as long as it's one of those options. So yeah, super handy, especially if you have a lot of, you know, cruft in your inbox and you just want to filter down to the unread things. I would love to have this same functionality in messages, too. That would be awesome because sometimes I will just get caught with lots of, you know, unread messages that just, you know, if I'm busy or whatever, it just streams in and it's like, well, where are they? And like last night, I found one from two weeks ago that was just buried, you know, way down in the stream. It's like, guys, I want to I want to see these. So anyway, there it is. And as Brian Monroe in our chat room at mackeekab.com slash stream points out Mac OS males app also has the same filter so you can do this same thing there and filter down. So there you go. So handy thing to know about, handy thing to know about, especially if you are, you know, one of our consultant listeners who helps people with their phones and they call up and they say, my inbox is empty. It's not seeing anything. It's like, well, are you filtered? Because you might have accidentally tapped that button. So there's several folks and a feak, especially in the chat room is saying the way I and by Brian Monroe are saying the way I found it the first time was acts. I accidentally tapped on it and tried to figure out what happened. So very cool, very cool little tip. Any thoughts on that, John? Before I I tell everybody about our first sponsor here for today. Proceed. OK, cool. Our first sponsor for today is Ops Genie now from Atlassian. You've heard us say this because it's true. Incidents are inevitable. It's just how it goes. Things are going to happen with your computers and your servers and all of that stuff. And if my week is any indication, oh, my goodness, are things going to happen? We had some major issues this week while our hosting company was trying to migrate our server to a new to a new data center. And they kept failing at it. And it was extra frustrating because they kept sending us emails that said, we've succeeded, our monitors show everything's good. But you should go ahead and check it out for yourself anyway. And of course, our monitors were saying, hey, major problem, no server. Really cool. Yep. Well, the cool part is that Ops Genie can take care of making sure you know what's going on, when it's going on, as soon as it's going on. And it doesn't just make sure you know it. Make sure all the right people know in the right order. It's really smart, right? Because you need to get these alerts immediately when an incident occurs. Otherwise, you especially in like this case, right? Our our hosting company said that they thought everything was good. It wasn't. If we didn't know that they had done anything and we didn't, how would we know that things weren't good, especially when we rely on them to take a look at this stuff? Well, Ops Genie is the way we knew. And what's even better is Ops Genie knows what time zone everybody's in because you tell it who's on duty when, who's takes vacations, who take all of that stuff and it creates a cascade of notifications. So it's like, OK, cool. Well, Dave's asleep, so check with Adam or check with the offshore team that manages things after hours for us, that sort of thing. Alert them all in the right order that gives your team the power to respond quickly and efficiently to these unplanned surprises, right? It helps notify all the right people at the right time because of that smart scheduling I mentioned, and it allows for deep flexibility in how, when and where alerts are deployed and supports integrations with so many things, over 200 of them, including Jira, Amazon CloudWatch, Datadog, New Relic. So it integrates with obviously the Atlassian stuff now that Ops Genie is part of that family, but also lots of other things because Atlassian understands that you use lots of tools, not just theirs. They're a smart company, really smart. So with Ops Genie, your next incident doesn't stand a chance. And I can attest to this. Visit OpsGenie.com to sign up for a free company account that lets you add up to five team members. Yes, free, no credit card, free. That's OpsGenie.com. Sign up and you'll never miss a critical alert again. Our thanks to OpsGenie at OpsGenie.com. And of course, the folks from Atlassian for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. David has a question and it's such a great question. I'm going to take a page out of your book, my friend, if I could and tease it a little bit here, you know, it's easy for us to get caught in the weeds, right? When somebody asks something very specific, we give very specific answers. And we talk a lot about Wi-Fi here and Mesh Wi-Fi in particular. And we've attacked it from many angles, not all of them, but many, many different angles and how you should do it and the best ones to get and the right things to look for. But David has a question and he says, my general question is short of equipment failure, total lack of coverage or something similar. How do you know when it's time to upgrade your wireless network? I've heard a lot of your discussions about routers over the past few months and I've learned a lot. But what do you tell people who are trying to figure out if their system is ready for replacement yet? It's a really good question. I don't think we've kind of gone into this. So David shares his and we might as well follow this. He says, in my specific case, I've got a two-story house, which is basically rectangular in shape. The cable modem and the airport extreme router are at one end of the ground floor. The master bedroom is at the opposite end of the second floor. In order to get better, that's a pretty typical setup, by the way. In order to get better Wi-Fi coverage upstairs, I added a TP-Link extender a couple of years ago. It sits in the hallway and solves the problem of our iPhones and Apple TV upstairs getting poor reception. Great. Since I use an iPhone SE and my wife's got a 10R and an Apple watch. We use a couple of MacBooks, Pro and Air and an iPad Air 2. Aside from that, the house has the obligatory smart TV downstairs and an Apple TV upstairs, two Amazon Echoes, a Sonos Beam, LifeX bulb and occasional devices from guests. Now, I don't have any complaints about my current setup. He says, I don't think I've noticed more than the very rare slowdown on Netflix once in a while, and that's probably due to cable modem congestion and local router stuff. Says, I seem to have good coverage throughout the house. And as far as I can tell, all Wi-Fi devices get the bandwidth they need. I absolutely adhere to the adage, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And as I've said, I have no complaints. But how do you know when creeping incrementalism like that has in creeping into incrementalism in technology advancements has made it time to look at newer options. I can picture a scenario where a newer phone or other device might benefit from a Wi-Fi spectrum that an older router doesn't support or there might be improvements in other areas that make an upgrade advisable. In my case, I think I have good coverage even upstairs. But am I looking at things correctly? Am I missing something? So no, like you've created what I will call a quasi mesh, right? With your router and your extender. And it's working for you, you know. But so this whole if it ain't broke, maximum definitely applies. The question that I think you're asking is, how can I be sure that it ain't broke? Right? That's the trick. And, you know, we tend to go deep here. And, you know, ignorance is not our friend, right? Ignorance is bliss for other people, and that's OK. But here we like to know, right? And sometimes that means that, you know, then a scenario that on the surface works is one that we know we is not OK and then we spend lots of time and money to fix it. So you have to know that coming in. That's that's sort of walking in the door here. But there are some things we'll make, you know, the so answering the question, how can I be sure it ain't broke, right? There's some things that will make this apparent, but others maybe not, right? These days, I would say you want to be certain that you're running a dual band at least router, meaning it's got both 2.4 and 5 gigahertz bands. And that the 5 gigahertz band supports 802.11 AC. That is going to make a big difference for your streaming stuff. It's going to future proof you a little bit, you know, and it's where you want to be today. And you are just FYI. That's all good, you know, with your airport extreme router, you've got 802.11 AC, you're getting the coverage you need. Where would a mesh help you? It I don't I don't think so, or would a real mesh, as opposed to your quasi mesh help you? I don't think so because you're not running into issues where a mesh might begin to help as if you had multiple devices streaming Netflix simultaneously. And you wanted to make sure the bandwidth was, you know, shared. And you had a little more headroom and that sort of thing. That could help, right? That's one of the big benefits of mesh that often goes unmentioned because the obvious one is coverage, right? You've already solved the coverage problem. But but that can, you know, that can help. You could use the speed test app, right? To run around your house and check speeds where you are. Again, this is, you know, removing the ignorance's bliss part of the equation because once you know that, oh, my speed in the corner of the bedroom isn't as great as I would want it to be. But it's enough, as you've already said. Well, you know, you can't unlearn that fact. And it may bother you, depending on who you are and how you think it may bother you or may not. So that those are my thoughts on this, John. I think in his scenario, he doesn't need to to upgrade because he's telling us he doesn't need to, but I mean, you can convince yourself you could use something like NetSpot, so NetSpot as a tool, haven't used in a while. But it lets you do what's known as a site survey, which you basically input a map of your residence or business or whatever and then walk around and take measurements and see how your coverage is. So doing one of those and seeing that you may be, I mean, he's already addressed the issue of bad coverage with an extender, which is good. So, yeah, it sounds like everything's. Yeah, everything's cool. But I'm with you also. I mean, you want to get it, you know, like I recently. My sister, you know, they were having a problem. I don't have a problem with their Wi-Fi. And they had a, you know, I'm like, well, what's the model? And it was 802.11 and I'm like, oh, well, no, you don't want to get AC to your advice. Yeah. Now, the question and now we can dig a little deeper, you know, at Brian Monroe in the chat room is pointing out that a repeater will potentially have your bandwidth, right? If it's just a single band repeater that is taking something and then sharing it again, that's just how that works. It will have the potential bandwidth. But that's only true if you've got a single band repeater. A lot of the newer repeaters are fantastic, have dual band support. They are essentially, you know, mesh type repeaters that are intelligent about managing that backhaul and all of that. As I'm digging into this right now, though, the one that David has is not that. In fact, it's not even a five gigahertz repeater. It's a 2.4 gigahertz, 300 megabit per second TP link repeater. So that is definitely a bottleneck in your home. Whether or not you need to change it again, sort of comes from, you know, if it's broke, but if you're connected to that repeater, you're definitely going to have much slower potential speeds than you would if you were connected to your router. So mesh would certainly solve this as would, you know, one of the newer higher end repeaters that's got dual or even triple band or tri band on those, you know, the Nighthawk, that EX6000 is a great one. And there's lots of other great ones, too. But that would be something to look at. And if you're going to bother doing that, then maybe you do want to, you know, kind of bite the bullet, move past Apple's airport extreme, which is going to continue to just, you know, get longer and longer in the tooth and buy into a mesh system. So so there you go. There you go. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? No, I think I think we've said it all. Yeah, cool. While we're on the subject of routers, you want to you want to take us to Doug, my friend? Yes, although I don't think it's necessarily a route. Well, no, it is a router thing. OK, kind of. So he says greetings from Toronto, Canada. Well, it's far away. Actually, actually closer to you and me than most of our listeners. But, you know, there you go. I recently purchased and installed an aerobase unit with two beacons. The Wi-Fi coverage in my three bedroom house has improved, but I'm left with a problem. My original setup consisted of a combo router modem in my basement connected by Ethernet to a Synology distation and my Apple TV. My desktop is in our second floor office and we have about 10 other Wi-Fi devices. I was backing up to the Synology. My device is using iMazing and my desktop computer using Synology software. When installing the arrow in the basement, I originally hung the disk station off the arrow and turned off the Wi-Fi on my combo router modem. That's going to be important. OK, and I had to, as I was reading this, that that was a that was a clue. We'll put an asterisk on that. Yeah, put a bookmark there. But then none of my devices saw the distation, even typing find Synology.com, which you can normally do and it'll just kind of figure it out. In my browser didn't work when I tried plugging the disk station Ethernet cable directly into my combo router modem. That gave me back access to the distation from on from my Apple TV and my desktop browser. But my desktop itself didn't see the distation so I couldn't use iMazing to back up iPhone and iPad. I found a personal solution by turning back on the 2.4 channel on my combo router modem. I'm using a different name for the Wi-Fi, which I understand is proper practice. My plan is to leave my desktop on the old 2.4 signal to handle back ups, but switch over to the Euro when I need to browse. But that's not very elegant. Is there a better solution? The Euro guys were no help, which I find surprising. I know just enough about networking to get myself in trouble. I think and I think that's an accurate assessment. I'm almost certain I know what the problem is here, Dave. And I think you probably figured it out as well. I think we've got a double Nat going on here. Double Nat. Can I can I mention he has a combo router modem, right? And I think his Eero is also acting as a router, which would explain why you have these. Weird access access issues is that, oh, well, if it's on this side, I can't get to it or it's on that side, I can't get to it. I'm almost certain that it's in he's running two routers. I can't imagine what else it could be. Well, that's exactly it. I was going to explain what double Nat is, but you did it. Two routers running on top of each other and both doing DHCP. Yes. Yeah. And that's why turning on the Wi-Fi for his cable modem gateway, you know, multi-purpose device worked because it allowed him to connect intentionally to the top level router, as opposed to the one down the stream, which is the Euro, that this is very true. It's and he he should, I think, well, he should put one of these devices in bridge mode. My feeling is that as a geek, I say, put the cable modem device in bridge mode and let the Euro do all the work in your network. That way you get all the benefits that that the Euro can bring to you. However, they may not allow you. Right. And but you can. Yes. Yeah. You can definitely put the Euro in bridge mode and and get the meshing benefits of the Euro while letting the other device do your actual actual router. Yeah. I'm surprised that it. I mean, I've I'm trying to remember if I've ever set up a network product and it warned me that it was in double Nat. Well, actually, no, that Apple's did that. Right. Uh, Apple's Apple Airport, you tell me, will warn you. Yeah. Yeah. The airport would say, hey, you got a double Nat going. Just just thought you'd like to know. I mean, it'll run and you may be able to get what you want done done. But, you know, as observed here, some things can't handle the double Nat. They just don't know how to get there. That's one of the things I liked about the plume Wi-Fi setup when I first plugged that in because I when I test Wi-Fi, I put it in double Nat mode so I'm not messing with my existing routing and all of that stuff. I just put it in double Nat mode and and test. And I'm aware that, you know, when I connect to that network, I'm I'm I'm doing that and it's fine. The plume I've never been able to buy could I could force it into double Nat mode, but it noticed that there was a router upstream and was like, hey, we put the plume in bridge mode for you because that's going to be best with the setup that you just plugged in, which I was like, oh, wow. I'm surprised the euro didn't figure that out. I don't know. Yeah, right. I agree with you. Yeah. I mean, it's it is something that it can know as, you know, Apple and plume have pointed out. Yep. Yeah. Very good, man. Good stuff. I like it. While we're on the subject of all of this crazy tech stuff, are we good with this one, John? I think we are, right? I think we're we're good. Cool. While we're on the subject of tech and homes and all of that stuff, Kaz had had an email that came in. I don't know how much of these details will go through, but but you know, it's interesting thinking about building and all that stuff. And Kaz, it says he's having a new house built and has some questions regarding Wi-Fi, home automation and audio. He says the electrician will be running wires in a couple of weeks. And so the house is expected to be completed in March. The house is a two-story construction with almost 5,000 square feet, big house. When we met with the low voltage guy from a home automation company, he said that the Eros would not be a good solution for the size of my house and recommended a commercial solution with a Luxol controller and a couple of access points for about four grand. Well, OK. I'll bet he did. I'll bet he did. Exactly. Yeah. He says that's way above my budget. However, I had the company put in the design three cable runs for three access points, two downstairs and one upstairs where a family of four and wireless use is as follows, it's heavy, five smart TVs, four iPads. I think, you know, six laptops or six computers, including four laptops, a bunch of phones, a PlayStation. They streamed Netflix and several music services all the time. And he says during Black Friday, he bought a three euro pro unit that he says just arrived. So he says, I might set them up to try them out. Good. He says, will the Eros be sufficient? Do I need more? Perhaps a couple of beacons. Number two, can I put them in the ceiling where the access point wires will be installed and can they run power over ethernet? Number three, what's the best place? Where is the best place to install the router? The installer recommends a cabinet in the laundry room where all the cables come together. And number four, my new subdivision will have AT&T fiber. And I hear we can get up to a gigabit speed. The house comes with Cat 5E, but I can upgrade to Cat 6 for about 700 bucks. Is it worth it? All right. So let's answer those questions and we'll see if we want to go on to home automation and audio, but I think I think we might stick with the Wi-Fi thing and then table those for another another show. Will the Eros be sufficient? I think Eros would work. Yeah, but there might be something better for you. And going on to question two, he says, can I put them in the ceiling where the wires will be installed, the ethernet cables and can they run power over ethernet? So, yes, you can put the Eros in the ceiling, but in order to run power over ethernet, you need Eros official power over ethernet kit, which is not inexpensive. It's like I think it's 100 bucks or 150 bucks. You might be better off going with the stuff from Unify. This is, you know, I haven't tested these yet. I keep meeting to lifespan a little busy. But I'm hearing more and more about folks using the Unify stuff in their larger homes with great success. And these are, this is from Ubiquiti, the people that make the Amplify mesh systems. But they've been making wireless and wired distributed systems for a very long time for commercial stuff. And this Unify stuff is their prosumer stuff. And a lot of folks run it, a lot of you folks run it and really, really like it. You can add a route. And the nice part about it is the Unify stuff, the router is separate from the Wi-Fi access points. So if in a scenario like yours, you've got all the wires coming into a place, but that's not really an optimal place for a Wi-Fi access point. Well, you don't have to put one there. You can put it wherever you've got ethernet to go. That will be digging into this. But because it's it's definitely a thing and it's the right decision for a lot of people if you're ready to sort of step past that consumer mesh, which is what Eero and Plume and, you know, those folks are all doing. And I do agree, though, that the router should be where all the cables come. Like, that's definitely going to be the easiest thing to manage and deal with. And if you do choose to go with the Eero, that means, yes, you will be putting one of your Eero's there. It's really not that big of a deal. I mean, it's, you know, they're not all that expensive. And if and you might be able to build your your wireless such that that is a helpful place to have an access point as well. And I think the Eero's I think the Eero's will work for you. I think Unify probably is a more elegant solution. But you've already got the Eero's. You will not be able to. I think you're probably going to not do power over ethernet with those. You've got to find some way to. Well, you've got to find some way to get power there. And so maybe power over ethernet at this point is the most economical solution. But if the walls are still open, then just, you know, putting outlets there is probably another way to do it or a better way to do it. And I, yeah, would you need more than three of them? Um, you know, that's hard to say. It depends on where the Eero's can sit, where the access points will be. I would think you probably are going to want to add, you know, one more. But maybe not like 5,000 square feet can easily be covered by three of these things as long as they're not all bunched up in the same area. Right. As if they're spread out and especially if they're they're backhauled with ethernet where you're not worrying about Wi-Fi between the two or between the three, that can really help make a difference. So you might want more though, um, you know, and the beacons are great. If you have drops where you don't have ethernet or spots where you don't have ethernet, but if you have ethernet, I would get another pro unit because, you know, that way or the gen two unit, whatever they're calling it, because that way you can backhaul it with ethernet and you're good to go. So, uh, oh, and then five. So, uh, to answer the cat 5e versus six question, 5e is certified for gigabit ethernet cat six is good up to 10 gigabits per second. Um, I think you're good with cat 5e for now. 700 bucks is a lot, but you know, it's a lot more when you have to rip the walls open. So, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, the latest is cat seven, right, which, uh, uh, from what I understand that that is for, uh, extended 10 gig runs, I think you're right. Yeah. That's right. I think, I think 5e is fine, but, but, you know, uh, there you go. It depends on how future proof you want to be. Thoughts about the, all any of this, John, the Wi-Fi stuff or anything like that. Uh, no, the hardware thing, you know, I think it's kind of interesting because we're just seeing the emergence of 10 gig devices, at least from Apple. Yeah. Um, yeah, that's true. That's true. You can, you can custom order the Mac mini with a 10 gig port on it. If you want. I mean, I'd say run a, you know, if you can all do it wired, do it wired. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah, my house was wired with RJ 11s. Yeah, right. No, but your house was also wired with coax and that's good for high speed between rooms. Yeah, you can use Mocha for that and get great speeds. So, yeah, yeah. All right, uh, Ralph writes in and, uh, and talking about the longevity of Macs. This is an interesting thing. He says, I heard Dave's comments on the iWork evolution and the inability to open new iWork files with legacy iWork versions, uh, on the older Macs. He says I'm currently living with this issue unable to open pages files on my 2009 iMac that were created on my 2015 iMac. While I understand the need to move forward, it's frustrating to be forced by software enhancements to replace otherwise fully functional hardware. All that aside, he says, here's my situation analysis. My perfectly functional 2009 iMac cannot migrate, uh, past El Capitan version 10.11. And he says the current version of iWork will not run on 10.11. So in order to run the current version of iWork on a desktop, I must abandon or replace the Mac. Uh, as to the workarounds discuss, sure it works, but they are all workarounds and a convoluted workflow involving extra steps to save a file is convoluted. It's just some other thoughts. Another workaround is to use the Microsoft Office suite, a much more powerful suite that embraces backward compatibility. And he says, but a general observation in my pre-Mac days was that using, was that I was used to upgrading my PC hardware every three years, perhaps more often because of software incompatibility, but, uh, or not because of software incompatibility, but because of performance. The PC simply bogged down since moving to the Mac in 2007, I have found Apple hardware maintains its performance and the need to upgrade is less compelling. My hardware software philosophy includes keep it simple by the best you can afford and run it till it drops and stay on current software. I did not anticipate the need to replace a perfectly functioning hard piece of perfectly functioning hardware because of software incompatibility, compatibility provided by the hardware supplier says, I'm the first to admit that I'm overdue to replace my 2009 iMac to fight, despite the fact that it looks and performs as good as the day I bought it. So, uh, one little thing is that since then, uh, we have discussed yet another workaround and that's to use pages in Safari. So pages at iCloud.com and then you will always have the latest version there as long as you can log into iCloud, which probably will work for maybe a little while, right, uh, even from El Capitan. So that's a workaround there. But really what I wanted to talk about, John, is this thing about upgrading hardware every three years, because, uh, it wasn't just true of PC users. It was true of us Mac users too, right? Up until basically 2007, we were upgrading our hardware every two to four years, depending on how we were using it and what we were using it for, for exactly the reasons you mentioned, speed, right? It would just get to the point where it was like all the things that we needed to do were way too slow because processor speeds were just, you know, as that whole Moore's law thing that we were living in and processor speeds and bus speeds and all of that were just increasing at such a rapid pace and we were taking advantage of every little ounce of performance that we were getting out of these things that we really needed it. And then the dual core world opened up and that's when that kind of slowed down in terms of consumers like us needing more speed right away. And so that three year cycle for, for most of us ended, uh, you know, in that 2007 to 2009 range, right? Because I still am running over at the house. I'm running some iMacs that are 2007, 2008 vintage and they're totally fine, except that they can't run the latest hardware and those computers, though, were bought expecting to be three year machines, right? Because the previous machines were all three year machines was like, okay, well, it's time. Here we got to go to buy a new one. It's like, whoa, now, you know, three years went by, still works fine. Five years went by, still works fine. 10 years went by, you know what, still works fine. Except now it can't run the OS. So I can't really blame Apple for this. They do need to evolve. We want them, we want the software to evolve. You know, I don't think they predicted that 2007, in 2007, I don't think they predicted that a 2007 machine would be totally fine, even for a, you know, more intense than casual user like me. I mean, it's not my main machine, but I've prepped many a Mac e-gab episode on one of those 2007 iMacs, and it's totally fine, totally fine. So, you know, it's just kind of how it goes. I'm frustrated too. The machine that I'm sitting in front of right now is a 2011 iMac, runs perfectly fine, can't run Mojave, runs perfectly fine. And the reason it can't run Mojave is because Apple evolved. They created metal, their graphics, GPU, you know, API engine, it's really not an API engine. We'll call it that, uh, you know, after this machine came out. And so this machine doesn't support it. But if we were on, if, if I ran Windows on this machine, it would run DirectX, which is very similar to what metal is, just different operating systems, because DirectX was created long before. So it's just kind of how it goes. And yeah, I don't know. I don't know. What do you think, John? What I have suits my needs. Well, but that's it. Like what the machines that you have are all way more than three years old. Right. I mean, and yeah, 12 and 2014. So, okay. And I see, I would consider those relatively current generation machines. I know they're not, but 2012 and 2014, that's great. You can definitely run Mojave on both of those and because they both support metal and, you know, you're happy and good to go. You can put enough RAM in them that they run. And that's really the CPU is not the bottleneck. Even for me at the, at the house, it's no, and that would be my criteria for considering an upgrade is like, am I, you know, stressing any of the systems and, you know, SSD, fine, RAM, fine. Processor, fine. And if I were, you know, find a need to do lots of heavy lifting, then maybe it's time for an upgrade. Sure. Of course. Of course. Yeah. And if the, or if the hardware just, you know, malfunctions and it's like, OK, well, now it's done. Right. Yeah, that could happen. Yeah. And that that's actually kind of where I am is it's like, you know, I've got all these machines that are, you know, it used to be because I had to upgrade every three years. I never found myself in a scenario where it was like, oh, well, you know, I don't have a new machine around right now. Currently, I'm finding myself in a scenario where I have, well, right now, because my daughter's home from school, I have two machines in the house that can run Mojave. That's it. It's like, whoa, that was sort of a rude awakening. But it also is a testament to how how well these machines all run. And so it's that's when, you know, I mentioned that, you know, for Christmas, Lucas and I are getting new MacBook Airs and and there might or might not be some other things coming to that I won't discuss until next week. But yeah, it's like, it's time. It's like, oh, yeah, I got to like now, instead of upgrading one machine, you know, here or there, I I just stopped upgrading when what I should have thought about was, OK, you know, I need to plan this because the planning was was previously dictated by circumstance. Right now, it's not so much anymore. But I'm in a scenario where it's like, probably I should be buying like four machines right now. Well, you know, maybe not right now. But yeah, there you go. So it's speaking of old machines. Yes. Yeah. Take us to Harvey, man. All right, Harvey, he's got he's got a machine very similar to mine. Hi, Johnny, Dave, I have a MacBook Pro. Mid 2012. Thirteen inch months, 15 inch. But otherwise, that's what I have. I noticed on either fruit juice or my iStat menu drop down. When I click on battery, it says my battery condition is service battery. It is listed as health 64%, which is 4% down from when I posted this on the forms. So I'm pretty sure I need to replace the battery. I know I can do it myself and I've done it with and I've done other internal changes such as adding memory or replacing the hard drive, which is correct. This machine, you can replace all those things or the user can do it. Sure. Then then they stop letting you do that. After 2012, it just got worse. My question is where to buy the battery. I know that WC sells a compatible battery for $97, and I'm sure it's a good one. But on Amazon, there are a number of similar batteries for under $50. Any thoughts is which one to get. If any of you had an experience with low cost batteries from Amazon that I should consider. Remember, this is a 2012 machine and works well for it. I use it for I'm not looking to replace it yet. I even still have my working 2007 MacBook, which is an external monitor. Which shows you how long I keep computers. I mostly work off of my iPad 6, so the MacBook Pro is not heavily used. And yes, what would I purchase? I would say, Dave, when it comes to batteries, I wouldn't skimp and I wouldn't get a cheap knockoff from Amazon because batteries can do exciting things like bulge and burn. Yeah, I'm with you on this, by the way. We are not going to find any disagreement here. You know, the last time I did this, it worked out OK. But I got one of my power adapters died, the old MagSafe one. And I bought a non-Apple one online. And it looks like it's an Apple product, except it isn't. Right. And my only concern was, you know, yeah, is it, you know, is it so shoddily constructed? And some people suggest as much that it's going to burst into flames. And actually, it got warmer than my Apple one. So they were they were using different components. But the thing is, it, you know, did the handshake with the Mac and it was providing the right amount of current like the other one. So I'm like, OK, I just kept my eye on it because, you know, something like that's going to fail, it's probably going to fail. You would hope immediately. Right, right, right. But the thing is, so there are two that I would recommend. So he found the one from a OWC. I fix it also sells a battery and they even give you tools. Though it sounds like it doesn't need them, but they also give you tools because you do have to open up the machine. I was actually surprised that Dave, so my system shows that I've used two thousand four hundred and ninety three of one thousand charge cycles. And it's a seventy nine percent capacity, which is weird, because I thought below eighty is when you started getting that message. So for those that have any sort of Mac, at some point, it's going to say service battery, which means, yeah, your battery is really kind of shot, so, you know, I should get it replaced. But I only thought that it made that recommendation when it was below eighty, but I guess not, huh? Because I did have one Mac where actually I did get that warning and it was within the warranty and they actually replaced the Apple replaced it under warranty. Oh, yeah, you know, yeah. They were like, yeah, you know, it should, you know, last at least two years. Right. I think I had Apple care. Yeah. Yeah. I think. No, I think it was covered under a recall program every now and then come because Apple doesn't make the batteries. They buy it from somebody else. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Of course. Of course. So I mean, it's nice that that's one machine where I mean, literally just, you know, unscrew the bottom unplug the old battery and put in the new one and then they still sell them. And that's it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm thinking about it because sometimes I mean, I'll get maybe four or five hours out of a full charge, which, you know, for that. It's pretty good. I mean, it works for me. Yeah. You know, especially at this capacity. Right. Right. That's pretty good. All right. All right. Let's go to. Yeah, we don't have much time. All right, we will take a quick one from Paul and see where that leaves us. Paul Paul writes. He says every morning when I first use my iPhone, I receive this dialogue that says Wi-Fi calling. You have registered the maximum number of devices for this service. And you get to click OK. Says I dismiss it and it comes right back. So I dismiss it again and it stays away until the next morning. He says I do have Wi-Fi calling set up on my iPhone, but I've made no changes. If memory serves, it started with the last iOS update, 12.1.1. Now we're on 12.1.2. OK, so there's a few ways that you can deal with this. I've seen this too, and it all depends on your carrier because your carrier can set a limit as to how many devices you're allowed to have on this. So the first place to go is to go to settings, cellular calls on other devices, right? And just see how many you have in here. And if there's something you can remove because your carrier might limit you and you just turn them off. These are all the devices that are logged into iCloud on your account, but you can turn them off for Wi-Fi calling here. You can also go into settings, cellular Wi-Fi calling. And in there, you can just disable Wi-Fi calling on this phone and or add Wi-Fi calling on other devices. And this might be one of those things where, you know, turn it off and turn it on again, actually kind of re-registers and reconfirms that the number that you have is OK. The number of devices, not the phone number. And in these cases in settings, when you're doing the turn it off and turn it on again, I recommend turn it off, restart the phone to be sure that you're relaunching settings and that the setting has actually stuck and then come back in and turn it back on again. One last thing that some folks on Reddit were saying was helpful and valuable to solve this particular problem is to go into settings general reset and choose reset network settings. That can that can also take care of this for you, as as many others have said. That's a handy one. I've seen that solve like weird Wi-Fi problems and VPN problems and and even cellular problems. I haven't had this particular one solved by that, but but I haven't tried it to solve this. I've I've solved this other I have seen this. I've just solved it other ways. So any thoughts on this, Mr. Braun, why are they limiting him? My guess is my guess is it's I don't know. It's because the carriers don't trust anybody and they I don't know. I don't know. I mean, how much how much bandwidth how is allowing that come on? Yeah, I'm with you. I'm I'm not I don't disagree. It's just pain in the neck. All right. One one last one, because we've got another quick one here, maybe from Jim, who writes and he says, I noticed in the newest version of Handbrake for Mac that they have added new presets for H.265 video. Can you talk about the advantages or disadvantages versus H.264? I'm currently using the Super HQ 1080p 30 preset and the file that files that it creates are fairly large. But when I tried the new Apple 2160p 64K HEVC, which is the H.264 preset, it was significantly smaller from the little research I've done on H.265. There are only certain players that can run this file type. I just wanted to know if you could talk about this. Yeah, of course. So you're right. You I mean, you've essentially stumbled on to it. The general answer is that H.265 results in way smaller files. Like crazy smaller. In some cases, we're seeing a file 25% of its original size, not 25% smaller, but 25% of its original size, some even less than that. So, you know, and with with quality, the same or better kind of thing. So if your device is supported and my guess is that I mean, if you're using an Apple TV and you're using iPads and iPhones, yes, they support it in Max, of course, with High Sierra and later with Plex as I'm as I understand supports it. All most of the I don't want to say all, but most of the major, you know, video players now all support it. So yeah, I mean, I think you're going to find pretty consistent support across the board. The way to test it, though, is to do exactly what you did. Create the file, see that it's smaller, plug it in to whatever media system you have set up. And check it everywhere. And if it works, then I would standardize on that. And because, yeah, way smaller. So have you messed with H.265 yet, John? I don't think so. OK, yeah, it's it's really impressive how how efficient it is at doing its its job. So yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah, what were they doing wrong before then? Yeah, better compression algorithm. It's just better. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Hey, on our way out here to before we leave, I, you know, this is the holiday season and the season of starts with Thanksgiving. And, you know, and we have all of our various different religious and secular holidays. We've got Christmas coming up this week. I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium supporters that that that thank that support us here. And you contribute and, you know, you make it possible for us to do what we do. And your continuing support really, really makes a huge difference here. So it has been a couple of weeks since we thanked all of our premium supporters. So I'm going to take a minute and thank everybody that's come in in the last couple of weeks. Let's see, one time donations we got. We've got quite a few. We've got twenty five dollars from Rick S. So thank you for that. Fifty dollars from Ken M. One hundred dollars from Carsten H. Ten from Devalpe and a hundred from James V. So thank you to all of you, to each of you for that. And then on the monthly plan, we have which is a ten dollar a month plan recurring. We have to thank Gary B. Jeff F. Joseph B. P. Tony Z. Ev the nerd Robert D. Nick S. Beth B. Ward J. Olga P. Jason A. Stephen A. Christopher S. At twenty a month, Paul M. Mike C. Mark R. Chris F. Joe M. at 50. I think Joe M. is 50 on the biannual plan. I've got him in the wrong list, but thank you, Joe. Randall M. Bob at Working Smarter for Mac users. Michael M. Ryan M. Neil L. Scott F. John G. Dave C. James C. and J. C. No relation amongst those three. Joe S. Frank A. Abdullah B. R. E. L. Michael P. Barry F. Bob L. Jeff P. John V. John D. Santiago M. Ken L. Clive S. and Dave G. So thank you to all of you on the monthly plan there, you rock. And then on the biannual plan, which I mentioned, which is generally 25 a month and Joe M. Is doing 50 on 25 a month. We have Stephen S. Paul C. Jean R. Patrick C. Andrew D. Monroe R. Stephen B. Paul D. Peter E. Brent G. James B. Jeff K. Tony S. Francis F. Larry S. John E. Phil G. Stacey S. Richard N. Peter P. and Barry P. And then we in those are all at 25 a month. So thank you, Chris B. And Chuck P. Chuck B. At 50 is not a month. Sorry, 25 every six months. Chris B. And Chuck P. At 50 every six months and Anders E. At 35 every six months. So thank you to all of you. You rock. And if you are interested in learning more about premium, of course, that's at Mackie Cab dot com slash premium. It is not mandatory. It's not necessary in individually. Of course, we appreciate you simply listening and sending all your questions and your tips and participating in the forums at Mackie Cab dot com slash forums. So much great stuff. All I can say is for premium members, we'll put in a good word with the guy in the red suit. So you don't. So you don't get a call in your stock unless you like call, unless you burn coal. That's true. Yeah, coal might be your thing. Like, yeah, some people have coal stoves. That's true. That's very true. Very cool. So thanks to everybody. Really, it's it's awesome. And premium members, of course, amongst many other things, get access to the premium at Mackie Cab dot com email address, which we prioritize when we're answering our questions here. So you folks help us directly and we we return the favor. And we do try to answer everything that comes in. You know that. But premium folks get answered first. So there you go. Let's see. We talked about the forums. We talked about that. It's yeah. You know what? We could use some more iTunes comments. If you want to get us something nice for the holidays here, Christmas present or whatever it is, we would love your reviews on iTunes. So go to MackieCab dot com slash iTunes. That's the closest I can get you there. There's no direct link to like this form where you would fill out a review so I can get you that far. And then from there, you've got to click that you want to review the show and then go ahead and review it. It really does help us to have reviews consistently. So if you have not reviewed the show, please. We would love it if you did that. If you have reviewed the show, log into a family members account and have them review us. We would love that too. So it's all fine. You can't review us more than once. And that's kind of crazy. It kind of sucks, right? Because we've been doing this somewhat, what? Coming up on 14 years now. And it's crazy that somebody that reviewed us 13 and 1 half years ago can't review us again. Like that's a little weird. So you find a way, right? That's what we do here. We solve those problems. So we'd love that, really. And of course, I want to thank all of our sponsors, Obstini from Atlassian at Obstini.com, of course. Eero.com slash MGG Smile at SmileSoftware.com slash Podcast of the World Computing at MaxSales.com. Barebones Software at Barebones.com. Ring at Ring.com slash MGG. It's all so fantastic. So fantastic. Really lucky to be able to keep doing this, John. It's pretty awesome, man. So Merry Christmas to you, John. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everybody else out there. We will talk before the New Year. John, do you have anything that you want to share? You don't have to just limit it to three words. You can, you know, whatever you like to say. I think I should limit it to three words. It's getting down to the wire. You know, the guys keeping, keeping that list and it's got some pretty good technology to do that. So, you know, just wait until the very last moment here because what you don't want to do at this point is you don't want to get caught. May not.