 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab Episode 668 for Sunday, July 30th, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you send in questions, tips, cool stuff, found, all of that stuff. We answer the questions, share the tips. Really everything we do here is with the goal of all of us, me, John, you, everybody, sending at least four new things each and every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Eero at ero.com. Eero is the mesh wireless vendor that just came out with Generation 2 of their product. We'll talk a little bit about that. Kupan code MGG there saves you all the costs of free shipping, all the costs of overnight shipping. It makes overnight shipping free. We'll talk more about that in a little while here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairpole, Connecticut, John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. F. Braun? I am doing great. That's good. That's good. We're not really recording this on Sunday. We should tell people in case there's some massive news that there's some OS update that comes out between Wednesday and Sunday. We're just recording a little bit early because there's some various travel stuff that we've got going on. But let's dive in. We've got some fun little tips. We've got some good questions. As you can probably hear in the background, I've got a computer fan that it's not making a noise that it usually does, and that's never a good thing. But we will persevere. Listener John asks or says, suggests, he says, I was listening back to McGekeb 664, but the guy who was looking for a way to program the password change on his Wi-Fi router so that his kids would have a different password to get from him each day. He says, really, this sounds like a job for Jamf. He could do a device restriction by installing a Jamf profile on the device. He says, he could do a device restriction and disable and enable the Wi-Fi on those devices. He says, I have a friend of mine who does this to his daughter's iPhone and iPad. He doesn't put her on restriction. When she misbehaves, what he does is he turns off the device camera and watches her hope slowly dim as she realizes she can't use Snapchat or Instagram or FaceTime or anything else. He says, it's a little bit evil, but a little bit awesome. I love this idea. This is awesome. And what a great idea, what a great use of MDM stuff, right, mobile device management. And Jamf, I can't remember how long ago it was they sponsored, but I think they're at jamf.com.mgg. You can get a trial or something. I should know that. I'll look that up, but yeah, but there you go. I think you get three, no, it is what I thought. You get three devices for free for life. So this potentially couldn't cost you anything and you're in great shape. So there you go. That's pretty good. Yeah. And I think it's a bit more straightforward. We suggest that a radio server and OS 10 and cloud-based things and all that, but Jamf kind of does it all for you in one place. So I like it, plus the evil aspect. Oh, turning off the camera. That really shows, you know, the nice thing about this guy is it shows that he understands his kids, right? Because that, the camera on that phone, especially the FaceTime camera that you use for all the selfies and everything, like that's something that my kids do constantly, right? Snapchat, the whole concept is you're taking a picture of yourself or something, but usually of you and then sending a message to somebody who's just back and forth, back and forth. So to disable that really has a negative impact on the kids. This is perfect. See, this is the way you use technology to employ parental controls. I like it. And for those that want to dip their toe in the water, you may want to get Apple's wonderful Apple Configurator 2, which lets you create standalone profiles to wreak all sorts of havoc with devices. But Jamf takes it to the next level. Yeah, you can't do those remotely, right? That's the problem with those. Yeah, you've got to have access to the device. Yeah, good stuff. All right. On to the first question of the day from listener Joe, who asks, I have a few of those small lithium ion batteries, which are used to recharge my iPhone and an iPad, et cetera, when I don't have a handy electrical connection. I'd like to know more about the charge level and maybe even the goodness of each battery. Do you know if there exists an app for Mac OS or even an app on the iPhone that can give me a status of an external battery that's plugged into the machine and thinking of something like that application that's built into Mac OS that monitors the internal battery? So, unfortunately, no, there's no app to do this because most of these batteries, I certainly haven't come across one that communicates its status across the USB link, right? It's just providing power. So in order for your computer to get the status of the battery, it actually needs to query the circuitry on the battery. And that's just not I've never seen an external battery that will do that. But you can test the capacity of your battery by letting it charge your device and seeing how much juice flows from the battery to your device and also how quickly. And of course, the the best way to do that is to get a little power meter. And we've found one that you found it to John. I've found one. I think it's 10 bucks today, changes every day. But we'll put an Amazon link to the to the little app and or to the little battery to the little dongle. Sorry. Wow. I'll get it right at some point, folks. You plug one end of it into the battery, then you plug your USB cable from your phone into into this little dongle. And it's got a little readout on it. And it'll show you the voltage, the amperage and then it's got, I think, nine counters on it's eight or nine counters and you can reset them separately. And it will count the amount of milliamp hours that have passed through that, you know, that that dongle. And and so you can you can see exactly how much your battery can send out before it runs out, which is handy. So there you go. Yes, Mr. Braun. Yeah. Well, that's the only way to do that. I mean, the thing is, you know, we did there's that app that I found what is it here? I mean, there is an app that will report the capabilities of what you're plugged into, including a battery or or a block or something like that. Yeah, it's the battery app. Well, it just says battery under it. But it only reports the capabilities like right now I'm looking. So I'm plugged into an external battery right now on my iPhone. It says USB brick 2400 milliamp hours, 12 watts. It's like, OK, cool, but that's not the capacity. The only way to do that, as you pointed out, is to get a meter that actually watches the electrons or milliamps, if you will, flowing by. So. Yeah, you know, I seem to recall in the past, there was I thought somebody made a battery that actually had a little meter saying this is how many milliamp hours I have left. Oh, I'm sure that's totally possible. I mean, the battery knows the question is just how can the computer get that out of it? That's that's really the only the only question. So this little batteries app. Now, you said it reported milliamp hours. Is that right? Well, no, the battery app that you know, we've talked about in the past. Yeah, for iOS. No, it reports the amps. No, reports the milliamps. Oh, I see the capability and milliamps of the battery is connected to. OK, that's not the capacity. It's it's the capability. Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right. OK, so not capacity, but just how how much could it possibly send? Ideally, if it was at full right charge, which, of course, all batteries, at least with current technology will lose their capacity. So that's what I'm asking. OK, so my question is, is it reporting the full capacity, the maximum capacity of that battery? And you're saying, yes, if I if I can decipher the the cryptic things that are coming out, yeah, OK. And you and I tossed that around in the past. You were like, well, it says that. But that's no, that's not what we tossed around in the past. I think that's why I'm getting confused. What we tossed around in the past was that this device reports the maximum current output in amps of a battery. And your iPhone may or may not take advantage of that current output. Right. But current and capacity are two different things. And that's what I'm that. And so so you're saying that this app reports both, huh? No. OK. No, it's just reporting. So this battery I'm connected to right now is a is the my charge. OK, very nice one. And it has high powered ports that offer two point four amps. But got it. OK. So it's just reporting that the battery is capable of outputting. OK, now I understand what you're saying. OK, just wanted to get to the bottom of that. OK. Yeah, so the only way is to measure with with an external meter and this power drive meter, these things are awesome. I, you know, for 10 bucks, I highly recommend it. It's good stuff. You you found that, John, that was a nice little find. So well, it's also a learning tool because you you help me understand the difference between the reported and the actual and right. I hooked it up and it's like, well, no, this many amps are flowing. Right. Right. Versus this is what the device says. It can do. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, your iPhone, your iPhone won't take more than it can safely receive is really what it comes down to. So. Cool. All right. Fun. Moving on to Harvey, I might as well go here and see what we can do. John, I'm curious your thoughts on this, too. Harvey says, I have a friend who is plagued with multiple copies of pictures in photos, both on her Mac and on her iPhone. It seems that iCloud photos, which she has enabled, must be the culprit. The question is, how can I put a stop to this? He says, I bought a program that weeds out duplicates, but it proved to just be a temporary fix. They all returned. OK. So this is interesting. I'm curious, Harvey didn't say which duplicate killer app he tried. But, you know, if it deleted them locally, that's really all we can expect out of a duplicate killer app. I, you know, I like power photos, but and perhaps, you know, using a different duplicate finder and killer will be the answer. But I'm not convinced that it will. I think you might run into the same problem. So what I would do while there's a couple of options, I mean, number one is you could go on the web and manually delete all the duplicates from iCloud photos. That I mean, depending on if there's 10 duplicates, that's fine. If there's a hundred or a thousand or even more, it probably not fine, right? But that is one way of doing it. You can manage your iCloud photos, at least from that level on the web. Another way to do it would be to log out all of your devices from iCloud photos, except one of your Macs. And then on that Mac run this duplicate killer or a different one again, let it delete them, let it sync with iCloud photos and let that settle in. Hopefully with just having one device connected to iCloud photos, they won't be coming back again. And then once you've done that, now log your other devices into iCloud photos and sync them up. And hopefully that kind of gets things back up and running. What do you think, John? What I think is I had an exchange with one of our listeners. I'm trying to look at my Twitter feed here, but I don't want to get too distracted. But I recommended, like I think you mentioned, power photos is one tool that can try to fix this problem. And I'm not convinced it will if the problem is with, you know, other devices pushing things back up to iCloud photos. I mean, it's possible power photos could do it. But if it can't, you know, that's where it starts to get interesting. I mean, the other thing is, you know, hop into the app store and I'm doing it right now. And I think that's what so the person I talked to, I said, well, you know, check out power photos and, you know, because he's like, well, I got all these duplicate photos. And he was like, yeah, well, it identified them. But then, then, you know, it rudely asked me to pay money. Well, yeah, that's kind of how that sort of thing. But then the conclusion is he's like, well, I found this app in the app store. And I think I see it here right now. But you may want to search for go to the app store and search for the term duplicate photo. And you'll see a lot of candidates there. Some are free, some are inexpensive, some are kind of pricey. He said he found, I assume it was he, found a 99 cent one. That did it for him. So yeah. Yeah, again, I think Harvey's friend's problem is more about syncing and less about finding something to delete the duplicate photos, but we shall see. We'll find out, right? All right. And then moving on to Rob. Rob asks, so I have the right Rob here. I do. He says, where are we here, Rob? I thought I might write to you about a Mac mail issue that has bothered me for many years and quite a few Mac OS OS 10 versions. I often send email attach attachments that are temporary. An example is taking a screenshot and then annotating it to help someone with a particular issue they're having. I then drag and drop the file onto the mail app icon, which creates an email that sends that file to to that person. Or I drag and drop the file into a message that's already or a mail message that's already reply. He says the file has no relevance beyond that specific situation. So once I've once I've sent the email, I delete the file. The issue comes when I later try to empty the trash often, but not always when I empty the trash. I get a dialogue that says the operation can't be completed because the item whatever .png or whatever .jpeg is in use. If I then quit mail, I can empty the trash without complaint from Mac OS. Any ideas why mail holds onto files that it doesn't require anymore? Is there something I'm doing wrong? Go ahead. Yeah. I'm just going to take a guess here. I'm wondering if it's holding on to the file because maybe there's a capability to undo your deletion. Does that sound even remotely? Well, I mean, undoing your deletion is dragging it out of the trash. He's just dragged the file. It's right. What I'm saying is that mail is somebody's holding on that file with the potential that you may want to undo or untrash it. So that's why you're getting that message. You see where I'm going with this? How would mail even know that you had trashed it? I know I don't see where you're going with it. I guess is the answer to your question. I mean, he's talking about attachment. He saves it to the desktop, right? Then he drags it into a mail message, you know, types a couple of things along with the attachment sends the message. Now, the message has been sent. It's been received by the recipient that files on the desktop. He drags it to the trash. What does mail care about that? Hmm. I'm just guessing somewhere it's it's holding on to it in case it may want to retrieve it. Yeah, no, I don't disagree with you. I mean, obviously, based on what he's saying, and I've seen this before where mail holds on to stuff. You know, my thought with this is I don't think you're going to be able to change mail's behavior. I think whatever it's doing, it is it, you know, it puts a hold on that file. Really, what it puts is an open on that file, right? It's dragged it in. That file is now opened by the system or open by mail, according to the system. And so the system won't delete it because an app is reporting. Yeah, it's open. And you could check this with from the terminal with L S O F, right? That'll list all open files and you could even, you know, then search that that resulting output for mail or something. And you'll probably see it. It's not going to help you. It's just going to confirm what you already know that mail is doing this in terms of and I realize, you know, there's there's lots of reasons why you might have a file saved on your desktop and then drag it into mail. But the scenario that you described can be handled a little differently. And by handling it differently, you will bypass this particular quirk of the OS that you found by by saving to the desktop and dragging into mail. So. Changing your workflow, both I've got two suggestions here, both of which skip the set the step of saving and then attaching a file from the desktop or from the finder in lieu of either using the clipboard or using some other system into application service. So number one would be to take your screenshot when you're when you're doing this for someone. And instead of taking your screenshot and letting it save to the desktop. When you take a screenshot, you can either use command shift three to take a screenshot of the entire screen or command shift four lets you take a screenshot of either a window or a section of the screen by dragging with your mouse. So let's assume you're using command shift four. If you do it with command shift four, whatever you do will be saved to your desktop unless you've gone and changed your preferences to save it somewhere else. However, if you add the control key to that, either to command shift four or to command shift three, the result of your screenshot will simply be put on your system clipboard. It will not be saved as a file. Then you can open up a mail message and you can paste that screenshot in. Now you said you wanted to mark up your screenshot. Well, Sierra has built in markup tools for images right there in mail. Float over the image in the upper right hand corner will be a little markup or a little, a little menu. And in that menu, you can choose markup and from there you can draw arrows and do all sorts of things that will probably get you at least most, if not all of what you need. The beauty of this is once you've sent the message, there is nothing to delete because it only ever existed on the clipboard. So that alleviates this particular symptom because you're not doing it that way. The other way to do it is the same thing, screenshot to the clipboard and use an app called Skitch. Skitch was acquired by Evernote, but it is available still from them for free. And and Skitch lets you do a lot of that same type of markup that that that mail has built into it. But you can do a little bit more. And in fact, Skitch even offers an extension so that it adds itself to the markup menu in mail. So you've got it right there. Even if you just use Skitch, though, and don't use it as part of mail's markup, when you're finished at the bottom of Skitch's menu is a little JPEG or PNG icon, depending on what format you want to export this in. And you can take that icon and drag it into mail, just like you've done with the icon from the finder. Again, the beauty of this is that it's using inter app communication. It's not saving it as a file on your desktop so you don't have to go and delete it. All the temporary stuff will be dealt with by the OS in the background. So changing your workflow a little bit might alleviate this problem or at least bypass this symptom. So there you go. Those are my thoughts on it. The final thought I would have is you may want to create a new mail message. And then if you go to the file menu within mail and say attach files, maybe taking a different path. No, instead of dragging it in, you mean just just using the I'm curious. Sure. Yeah. Doing that would makes mail react differently. That's totally possible. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's worth trying. If one way so far. Right. Try another. Yeah. And the other suggestion is don't do that. Right. Yeah, do it. Just do it. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I figured, you know, a lot of folks might not know how easy it is to use mail's markup or might not have known about sketch or folks might not have known about the. In fact, you could have gotten at least three of your four new things just in this question alone, just by learning about the control key. And maybe maybe you didn't know that command shift for exists. Oh, let me throw the fourth one in. I said when you do command shift for what happens is you get a little crosshair command control shift for the same thing. You get a little crosshair and you can draw on your screen to pick the area of your screen that you want it to take a screenshot of. Well, if you hit the space bar while that crosshair exists before you've started dragging, the crosshair changes into a camera. And you'll notice as you float your mouse over windows, the entire window lights up. And as you might guess, clicking when your mouse is over a window will take a full screenshot of just that window and not any of the other windows around it or behind it. So you can get a really clean screenshot of a single window just by doing, you know, command control shift for hit the space bar now float around your screen. And it'll even take screenshots of windows in the background and it will take the entire window. So it's pretty cool. Handy little feature. So there you go. You might have gotten your all four of your things. Now everything's creepy. OK, we're done. Bye. That's right. We're done. That's it. Hey, before we're done, though, I want to talk about. I want to talk about our sponsor. I this is this is going to be it actually to you. It will sound like a very standard Eero spot and it is. But there's a whole back story here that anybody that's interested in the future of podcasting and all of that might or might not be interested in. John, you're still there. Yeah, no, it's just a maze that the the impact of the upcoming message here. Well, it's not. I mean, it's it may be very impactful. I may be amazed. Yeah, but there's an entire episode of the small business show podcast that I do with Shannon Jean every week that came out on Wednesday, July 26. I believe it's episode 129. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Feel free to to listen to that. It's about a 30 minute episode and I would say 20 minutes of it talks a lot about the relationship, especially as far as I see it between us and you, our listeners and kind of everything that we have going on here. So the interesting stuff. But but that being said, John, is it all right for me to talk about our first sponsor here? I insist. Cool. Our first sponsor today is Eero. As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, Eero is a mesh wireless company. We've talked about them a lot here on this show. Chances are most of you already know a lot about Eero, but there are some new things, some things that have changed with Eero. Specifically, Eero has just launched the second generation of their hardware. Anybody that's heard me talk about mesh has heard me say the most important thing is hardware, except that the most important thing is software. And really, what I mean is that you can't change the hardware once you've bought it, but you're also stuck with whatever software your mesh vendor chooses to ship and update to you. And Eero has been on the forefront of adding new features and doing all kinds of great stuff with the software. So to see them come out with new hardware is awesome. The two pieces of hardware that they've come out with. Number one is the generation two Eero unit, which looks exactly like the original Eero's. It's kind of a little Apple TV shaped puck, but instead of just having two radios in it, it has three. They've added a third or a second five gigahertz radio. So it's got now two five gigahertz radios as well as one 2.4. And the nice part about that is, is it really kind of frees things up, especially in those scenarios, which is most of them, where you've got wireless backhaul, where the Eero's are all talking to each other wirelessly. This gives you an extra band for that to happen. Eero also added a piece of hardware called the beacon. Now the beacon is something that just plugs right into the wall and stays right there on the wall. The beauty of the beacon is you don't have to put it on the table. You don't have any cords or anything. It just plugs in and it is your mesh access point now. So you've got your main one that plugs into your router and then these beacons and in fact, all the new kits, kind of the standard new kit comes with one Eero and two beacons, although you can get it with one beacon if you want, or you can get it with, you know, three Eero's. And the beauty is you can mix and match these things. If you've got an existing Eero setup, but you want to add another access point, you can go and buy one of these beacons. It is backwards compatible with what you have. I've tested this stuff. I've actually got Eero set up here in the office with the second gen stuff. And I've also taken one of the beacons over to my dad's house where he's got the first gen Eero setup and it's seamless. And what's really cool is the new Eero's and the new beacons add support for something called Thread, which is sort of the next generation of a technology that lets you talk to all of your Internet of Things devices that don't use Wi-Fi. And the beauty of that is having it all in one device, the radios can manage each or the radios are all managed sort of by the same brain so they don't get in the way of each other. So you got to check this out. Go to Eero.com E-E-R-O and you can place your order right there. And when you place your order, add overnight shipping to it. And they're going to put the cost for overnight shipping to you right on there. Then add coupon code MGG. That cost is going to be zero. So you get free overnight shipping when you go and buy Eero through this. Like I said, I've been testing this stuff here. And you know, even the experience is similar to the first time I tested Eero. I plugged it in and it works. And you're actually running, your entire house is running Eero, isn't it, John? It is. And, you know, the thing that tickled me, we saw them in a recent show, Dave. And the industrial design of it is very clever. I agree. Yeah. The one thing they shared with me, I'm like, why do you have it shaped kind of not an entirely square? Yeah. They're like, because we don't want you to put anything on top of it. If you look at the design, the curved top is intentionally designed so you don't stack something on top of it because I assume they're going to block the antenna. Disappation. Oh, yeah. I just call all sorts of grief. But the thing is that their industrial design just shows how good these guys are at what they do. They're like, they're the thing is, if you try to put something on top of it, it's going to fall off. It's going to slide off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've never been tempted to put anything on it because it's just not shaped that way. That's fascinating. All right. Well, check it out. Go to Eero.com. And again, coupon code MGG. After you add overnight shipping, we'll make that for free for you. Our thanks to Eero for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Time machine, iCloud, backups, iTunes. We've got some questions, man. No, I think we can I think we can sort it out. Yes, we'll start with we'll start with Greg. Greg writes, he says, what's the difference between using iCloud versus Time Machine for backups? I've read they each have different purposes. iCloud I've read is designed to sync your files between your different devices or provide backup for specific files and specific devices. Whereas Time Machine is designed to backup total files from one device, your Mac. Is this interpretation correct? It is. I just want to make sure we're talking about iCloud has many different facets to it. Right. We talked about iCloud photos. We talked about, you know, iCloud Mail. There's all kinds of things that that fall under this umbrella term. iCloud. What you're describing is iCloud Drive. And yes, iCloud Drive is a sync engine that automatically syncs whatever you put in it or whatever your apps put in it, because apps can put things in it without you sort of manually doing that. It syncs whatever you've put in it amongst all of your iCloud connected devices. There is an iCloud backup engine that's only for your iOS devices. That's a little bit different, right? But that's not for your Mac. iCloud backup doesn't exist for the Mac, although again, you know, iCloud Drive, if you choose to add your documents and your desktop and things like that to it, which you can with Sierra and later, then those things are synced amongst your computers. Again, sync is not backup. We've talked about this, but it, you know, it can still save your bacon if you wind up having a problem. Time Machine is more like what I would consider backup to be, although there are some significant flaws that we could sit here and argue that Time Machine doesn't backup either. Well, in that there's no verification done, right? So it saves these files off to your Time Machine drive, but it doesn't confirm that they actually made it. So does that mean it's not really backup? Some would argue, yeah, that's exactly what that means. It's almost but not quite a clone. Well, no, Time Machine is not a clone because you've got multiple iterations on there and you can't boot from it. I would differ with you, my friend, because the thing is, if you do have a Time Machine backup and you set up a new Mac and you want to restore the contents of your old Mac from a Time Machine backup, you can do that. So it's so do you see what I'm saying? It's kind of a clone, but not entirely. You can't boot from it. Right. Yeah, I would say it's a backup. I mean, it's a backup. Yeah, because a clone to me, a clone is a bootable version of it's a bootable copy of what you have. And it's everything, right? Time Machine doesn't include everything. Your operating system in particular is completely omitted from Time Machine. Right. But like I said, if you're setting up a new Mac and you want to migrate the contents of an old Mac, you can do it from a Time Machine backup. But but it's not. Yeah, technically, it's not a clone. It's it's a pretty thorough backup, but not everything. So it's not everything. No, but it is when it's functioning well. I agree with you. It is pretty thorough and restoring from it is cake. Again, when it works. And so we'll just put that asterisk over everything we talk about with Time Machine. But when it works, like I use Time Machine largely because I don't rely on it. Right. I know that it's got some problems. I know that it's possible. I'll need something out of it and I won't be able to get it. But when I need something that I no longer have, that I believe is part of my backups, the first place I go to get it from is Time Machine because the restore interface for Time Machine is so smooth and so easy to use. So. So there you go. You know, yeah. And to share with our listeners, the thing is, Dave, you know, it's amazing. When I had prior, be it, you know, the TP Link Archer C9 or the Apple Airport Extreme, yeah. Doing Wi-Fi Time Machine backups would regularly get corrupted. And then you get this message saying, yeah, your backup's garbage and sorry, you're going to make a new one. I have never since I got the Euro, Dave. So hats off to them. Well, we'll give them a little extra plug here. But the thing is I have not had a corrupted backup issue since I've moved to the Euro. And you're still backing up wirelessly from your. Well, from my MacBook, from my MacBook Pro. So the only thing that's like, you're right, your MacBook Pro is still connecting wirelessly. Your backup is still where it was previously. The only thing on the Synology. On the Synology. So OK. So the only thing that's changed is the essentially the router in the middle. Yes, is that I've. Wow. I have. Ever since I got the Euro, I have not received a message that my time machine backup has been corrupted and needs to be recreated. So, you know, that doesn't surprise me. I mean, here's my speculation. I mean, OK, so it's entirely possible that just random luck has totally, you know, blessed you. Right. But an OS update could have fixed the bug. Totally. Right. Correlation is not causation. Right. But if we are to assume that in this case, correlation is causation, I can actually explain that, right? Because here's the thing. When you had your Archer, you know, just a single router set up. And this is why this is one of those things where, you know, people ask me, what's the benefit of mesh? And one of the big benefits of mesh is that you get, you know, coverage everywhere in your house, right? So, I mean, that that's that's sort of the one that generally sells it to people. But it's not the only benefit. And one of the other benefits is because you've got multiple mesh points throughout your home, more devices can be actively connected simultaneously. Yeah, yeah, I know. Your devices all are associated with your access point all the time. That's fine. They aren't actually all getting to talk at the same time because the way your devices work is only one device can talk to one radio at a time. So with but with mesh, that's also true. But you've now got instead of perhaps two radios like you had with your Archer now in your house, you have six because you've got three mesh points. So it's entirely possible that that makes the it makes the connection more reliable. And that, therefore, is, you know, what makes your time machine backups more reliable. I totally see that. Yeah. Fascinating, man. I think it's worth mentioning. So what is the product there? So they do have. Hmm. What are you asking about? Yeah, I'm thinking about is a daisy disc, which kind of crosses some borders. So you date. Are you talking about Dolly Drive? Or Dolly Drive. Dolly Drive. Yeah, so Dolly Drive was and I think still is a wire, a cloud based time machine type backup, right? It essentially moves time machine to the to the cloud. And it was it was one of those things that was kind of awesome in theory when it first came out and then kind of became awful because it it was relying on time machine. And now I don't think it relies on time machine anymore, right? It's a separate app and sort of does its thing. And and I'd be curious. I haven't used it in a while, to be perfectly honest. I used it when it first came out, was really excited about the concept. And it's, you know, it just it was it had time machine and its foundation. And so it was a mess. When we first saw it, it was at a Macworld pass. They were like, hey, check out this clever thing we're doing. And it's like, wow, that's pretty clever, dude. And they're out there, right. And the but they're kind of a hybrid product in that they they cross. Yeah. Boundaries here. Yeah, I don't know that I don't know that they are any different now than any other cloud backup. I mean, they don't have that they're not reliant and they're not using time machine anymore, which I think is a good thing. So I think they're just yet another cloud backup service. I don't mean to diminish what they're doing. I just don't, you know, I just want to kind of compartmentalize it the right way. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I mentioned, Daisy disk is actually a disk capacity measuring tool for those that are interested in that sort of thing. Totally different. But but yes, also cool and sounds similar. It's got that double D thing going on. Exactly like Dunkin Donuts. That's kind of a Northeast thing, I think for the most part. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you if you drink coffee or you like donuts sandwiches and stuff, too. They got breakfast sandwiches and all that. Have you been there lately? Yeah, my daughter during the school year, my daughter works at our local Dunkin Donuts. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Outstanding. All right, let's get back on topic here. Todd, save us. Todd asks in the same vein that we started this segment in. iTunes provides two options for backing up my iPhone, iCloud backup the most important data on your iPhone to iCloud and also this computer, a full backup. If your iPhone will be stored on this computer, he says, I use this computer. He says, because with iCloud A, I don't know exactly what Apple considers most important. And of course, they don't explain that here. So I don't know what I would actually be backing up. This is B, my 32 gig iPhone is about 80 percent full. So I'm currently trying to back up 26 gigabytes. But my iCloud only has five gigabytes in my account. Since only important data is backed up and Apple doesn't explain what that is, I have no idea how much space it would use. Yes, I could buy more iCloud storage, but no thanks. I already have other cloud services I pay for as well as plenty is plenty of local storage at home. And he says, and I think I'm amazing, enables us to back enable us enables us to back up to an external drive. And then C, he says, because this computer option offers to encrypt local backups, but the iCloud option does not mention encryption. If that's because iCloud backups are always encrypted, great. But hey, Apple, explain that here. And then he says, Dave, you said you use both. Why both? Is the iCloud backup just another layer of protection for your important data and how do you use iMazing for local and iTunes for iCloud? Thanks. All right, Todd, let me see if we can get through all of this. So I want to start. Sure. I don't want to rudely interrupt you, my friend, but I do want to start off with an Apple support article that kind of explains this mysterious terminology. Sure. It's called about backups for iOS devices. And it says, decide which method is best for you. And it says, with iCloud, this happens and with iTunes, this happens. So I will paste that in a chat room, which I guess you got it already. I'm on it. So they have an article and it looks like it's I mean, there's some minor nuances between the two, but it seems like they pretty much. You should read it to decide which is best for you. That that's all I'm going to say, but please continue. Yeah, all right. Well, I might go through some of this stuff. So correct me if I'm wrong or add stuff from this article if you if you find me missing anything. So to start at the top, iCloud, in general, backs up anything that's not redownloadable. That means that all your app settings, all your app's data, all your health data and any documents you've created, it does not back up application binaries because those can be redownloaded. It doesn't back up music or movies or anything like that. Your photos, however, will be backed up if you're not using iCloud Photo Library. If you are, then they're already there in iCloud and iCloud doesn't store them again. It's already got them backed up. So moving, taking that and moving on to the second question about how much will the iCloud backup take? You won't really find out how much space an iCloud backup will use until you enable it. And then it will calculate and tell you and also alert you if you don't have enough iCloud space. It's not uncommon to have 30 gigs used on your iPhone and only have a couple of gigs to back up unless your 30 gigs is used by a ton of photos, which, of course, is pretty common for all of us these days. Photos are, by far, the most common reason that any of us pay for iCloud storage. I could get away with any of my other various cloud services for all my other stuff, but Apple makes iCloud so easy for photos that and nothing else is quite as reliable at just being certain that my photos are backed up that that I happily pay for two terabytes of photo storage. Now, with iOS 11 and MacOS Hi Sierra in beta, you can actually enable, even though I'm the only one in the house that's actually my son is running the public betas of iOS 11. But I've got iOS 11 running on one of my machines and Hi Sierra on another. And because of that, I was able to get everybody in my family onto this shared family plan of two terabytes. So I'm saving money from where I was, but the 10 bucks a month is for sure totally worth it to just know that everybody's photos are backed up and synced and all that stuff. But I totally get why you might not want to pay Apple 120 bucks a year. You know, that like that makes sense. But they do make that part easy and it's not easy for any other app to be certain that it's always going to be able to run and all of that stuff. In terms of encryption, iCloud backups are always encrypted. Local backups should be encrypted, but you have the option not to. The reason I say they should be encrypted is because if they are, then Apple will store your passwords and your health data in your local backups. Right. If you don't encrypt your local backups, then that won't be stored. But they are always stored in iCloud because iCloud or I should say always stored in iCloud backups. But if you don't backup to iCloud, they're not backed up there because all iCloud backups are encrypted. And then to kind of answer the last question, yeah, I use both. I used to just leave my iTunes and my phone set to backup to iCloud. And then every now and then I would either plug my phone in or wirelessly just do it and go into iCloud or sorry, go into iTunes and tell it to backup locally, which you can do. Since iMazing Mini came out, I've been using that. And thus far, it seems to be doing a pretty good job of backing me up locally and making sure everything's good. So now I'm backed up both to iCloud and my computer and the computer backups are happening automatically, which is really kind of nice. So that's what I got. I don't know. Did I miss anything, John? Mr. Braun. No, I think you're there. OK. I think the only thing that I think you did mention, of course, the only thing with iCloud is you got to make sure that you have bought enough space within their restrictions, right? Or is, of course, doing a local backup, you probably have. Most people probably have more locals. Well, I don't want to make out that assumption. No, but that's I think that's a safe assumption that people have more than five gigs of local storage. Yeah. I mean, they mentioned in their article, I think they can store up to what was it? Two gig to two terabyte depending on how much iCloud space you've you've bought. Yeah. So one reason to do it locally is that it's limited only by your disk space, which most people these days, you know, storage is relatively cheap. Before we move on past the backup segment, I do want to once again, I mean, I know I mentioned it last week when we, you know, when we talked about Backblaze and I'm sure that code still work backblaze.com slash MGG when they were a sponsor of last week's episode. But it regardless of which cloud backup storage you use, I can't. Stress enough how valuable it is to have an off site backup. We've talked about that for years, right? If we've been doing this podcast 12 years and we have, then we've been talking about the value of off site backups for 12 years. What's changed in the last 12 years is this concept of the cloud, right? The cloud is really just another computer somewhere else. Well, guess what? That qualifies as off site. And so that's why a lot of these cloud backup services are thriving because they make it super easy to do that, which used to be very difficult, right? It used to be that if I wanted an off site backup, I had to like work with John to or pilot Pete, right? And we had stuff that we were sending to each other's houses and all that. Now, it doesn't matter. I don't need to keep a drive at John's house or drive at Pete's house. I just backup to the cloud. So make sure that an off site backup is part of your backup strategy for both your iPhone and your Macs. It's just, you know, an iCloud. Unfortunately, iCloud really is the only game in town for your iPhone, for your Mac, obviously, there's there's lots and then that's great. And ironically, Apple's not one of them. And it's part of Dave, what many call. And I hope you can all remember this. But it's called a three to one backup strategy. What am I talking about? Three copies, two are local. One is off site. That is acknowledged by many backup gurus as the right way to do things. Yeah. So. No, for sure. That that's I mean, that's what you want. And locally, you know, we talked about time machine. It's fine, but don't rely on it as your only local backup at the very least. At the very least, also keep a clone, right? And if you can, and Time Machine actually makes this possible, have multiple Time Machine destinations locally that you backup to because that way when one of them gets corrupted or whatever happens, well, you got another one. Good to go. So like if you happen to have a Synology, Dave, like I do, or you have multiple Synologies, you could use their hyper backup to copy your Time Machine from one to the other, which is exactly what I do. That's smart, man. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. It is good. All right. Let's move on. Shall we? I'm trying to think of what we have here, looking at the rest of this thing. You know, let's let's. Yeah, we'll do that next time. OK. I was going to say, you just mentioned Synology. We have a bunch of NASA related questions that we've been queuing up, but we'll save those for the next time. Save those for the next time. All right. But I do have one person in the chat room at Mackeygov.com slash stream that is saying that actually they they they're misreading the question. There's a question about Netgear versus Synology, and I think it's actually a router related question, not a NASA related question. But but we will get there today. We will get to that one. In fact, let's just do it now, John. Shall we? We've got a request. It's like you're a rock band on stage. Can you say no to a request if it's a song you were going to play anyway? Don't call me, surely. All right. So we will go there and we will answer Brian's question. So. Brian asks, I recently finished listening to Episode 662 on your segment about router advice. You were mentioning the Synology router. My father just bought me a birthday gift, the Netgear Nighthawk AC5300. The next in the next year or so, I would like to pick up a Synology 4 bay unit for home NASUs. I currently have a four year old time capsule that is becoming irritating with dropping offline, staying stuck on the 2.4 GHz radio, etc. Since I have been out of the router loop for so long, am I better off returning the Nighthawk AC5300 router and returning it for the Synology 2600 if I'm going to also buy a Synology disk station the next year or so? Or feature wise, are they similar? It seems prices are the same. I'm wanting inbound VPN access, good quality of service, which Apple lacks and better home coverage. Thanks for your time and keep up the fantastic work. All right. So here's the thing, that Netgear AC5300 router has three radios in it, right? And they're all kind of monster radios. So the Synology, though the RT2600 has two radios in it. And they are both monster radios, right? They're both all the radios and all these things that we're talking about are four by four radios, which means each of them has four antennas for outbound and for inbound. Even though most of your Apple devices generally only have two antennas for inbound and outbound, those four antennas really help you because what it means is with essentially, you know, technology that we call beamforming, the router decides which of its two, you know, which two of its four antennas it is going to aim at you depending on which radio you associate with. And that can actually make your range better. It can make your speeds better. It makes a huge difference having these four by four radios. If you're only going to have one router, you sort of get that same thing, you know, kind of bringing the mesh thing back in because your mesh points are all over the house. So even though most of these mesh devices, Iroh included, which is sponsored this episode, are two by two radios, meaning they only have two. You've got two by two in the living room and then two by two in the dining room and two by, you know, so it's picking the right ones there, too. So the big difference between the Synology and the Netgear that you're describing is the addition of the extra five gigahertz radio. If you've got a lot of devices on your network, having that extra radio can make a difference. The Netgear router uses something called band steering so that it balances how many devices are on each radio. If you enable it, you can also disable it, but it will balance those out so that you've got, you know, not just everything on one five gigahertz radio and nothing on the other, it balances it out. Like I said before, that means that if you've got multiple devices that are streaming kind of like John's scenario with his backups, it can move things around and make your network more efficient. So from a pure radio standpoint, the Netgear beats the Synology. The at least that Netgear beats the Synology router. That said, there are some features that the Synology wins. You mentioned you wanted inbound VPN access. Netgear has it, but it only supports open VPN, which is not natively supported on any of your Apple devices, not on your Mac and not on iOS. You can install the app. It's free and you can configure it and it's not terrible. But with the Synology, it will support L2TP as a VPN protocol, which is natively supported on the Mac. It also supports open VPN. It also supports Synology's own SSL VPN. And let me tell you, when we were at Mac stock, there was a day where everybody like the wireless was something about the wireless. There was awful, right, John? You couldn't get your email or anything, right? They I think they had a I ran a thing and they had some sort of lock down device that severely restricted the usability of their Wi-Fi, which was right upsetting for all of us. Well, upsetting for most of us. I was not upset because while you were the speaker radio, no, I had to do the guest account. I did not. The speaker account wasn't working that first day. Oh, OK. No, so I was on the same. I was no, it wasn't suffering. That's what I'm trying to tell you is because I connected. I couldn't connect to my open VPN at home because whatever was blocking things blocked it. I couldn't connect to my L2TP VPN at home because whatever was blocking things was blocking that. But I was able to connect to my Synology VPN at home because my Synology VPN runs on Port 443, which is SSL traffic. If anybody is going to block anything, they're not going to block Port 80, which is normal web and Port 443, which is secure web. So I was able to connect no problem. And then from there, obviously, once I'm connected to my VPN, I can do whatever I can do from home. So I had I not only was I having no problem connecting, but I was also having no congestion because no one else was able to do anything. Right. Yeah, no, it's great. And, you know, when my family was in China, they had the same thing. And, you know, invariably, that Synology VPN was the sort of the fallback that was like, yeah, man, it works. Now, that does require an extra app, but it is this super reliable thing. So VPN, there's no question. Synology wins in the router world, not just compared to Netgear. They win compared to anything you would buy in your home. If you want an inbound VPN, Synology is going to beat that. You talk about QOS. Synology has QOS. Now, I'm talking about, you know, QOS is the quality of service. It's one of these sort of blanket terms that describes a lot of different things. When I talk about QOS for the router, what I am what I prioritize is managing your internet connections, traffic such that any one device in your home can't negatively impact all the rest of the devices in your home. And I always use the example when, you know, you got one of your one of your devices, maybe your Mac decides now is the time to back up all your photos. Well, you don't want your iPhone and your other Macs to be slow when checking email or surfing the web just because this other device is barfing everything up to the network. Proper internet connection, QOS can can completely eliminate any issues you might see. The Synology is OK at QOS. It could be better. Netgear is pretty good at QOS, I think. And in that stand in that place, netgear wins. But it's it's a marginal win. It is it is measurable. But it's Synology has some level of this. It's just a little wonky the way they do it in terms of better home coverage. Again, that netgear routers got a third radio. But I have that Synology router here. I'm not currently using its radios because I'm testing other radios because things are always crazy here in the Hamilton household. But that Synology goes pretty far and pretty fast. It is the most powerful to radio, you know, dual band router that I've ever used in my life. So, you know, if I had to pick between the two and and perhaps it's worth pointing out that I don't have to pick between the two because I have both of those routers here. In addition to probably eight others, I pick the Synology as my home gateway. So that maybe that gives you my feelings on it. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on this, John? I haven't tried either. The one thing I do notice, Dave, the. Well, toss in here, the Nighthawk or the AC 53 out here. That is. Yeah, OK. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy that as for intent is the one thing that they mentioned, which I don't believe you did, but that they claim to have some sort of industries, first active antennas that they claim to do something magical in the antennas that nobody else does. I can tell you what that is. I've talked to Netgear about this and call it active antennas. So apparently they put some circuitry in the antennas versus on the motherboard and they claim that that's better. Right. So what you found that. Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's hard to say whether it makes a difference or not. What they do is the antennas and the Synology has four antennas on it as well, but the Netgear calls their antennas active. So the sending antennas, if you see a router that has four antennas, that probably is only the receiving four, right? The sending for the other eight, you know, the four of the eight antennas are internal to the device. But these receiving four antennas are on the outside of the device because really the issue is getting the signal from your iPhone and your Mac to the router, right? The router's got all the power in the world. It, you know, it's plugged into AC. It it's like it's its enclosure is built to be, you know, to let radio waves emanate from it, right? So sending data from your router out really isn't the problem. It's the receiving data in where things get dicey because your phone is like, you know, hidden in your hand and you've got all kinds of problems. So what Netgear has done with these antennas is they've moved the circuitry for the antenna all the way out into the antenna, separating it from any noise that might be happening on the router's motherboard. And in theory, that would, you know, giving it discreet power and all of that stuff that would clean up whatever signals coming in and let them lower the noise floor, which means you get a better signal in from the devices. Does that make sense? It's crazy. Sure. Yeah, sure. Right. I mean, theoretically, it makes sense. These antennas have blue lights on them. And maybe you like that or maybe you hate it. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. It's crazy, though, John. The other thing I'll mention is so you were talking about VPN stuff and I just stumbled across this from our friends at TunnelBear. But I thought I'd mention it. I don't know if you're aware of this, Dave, but and it's kind of sneaky. And I'm wondering if if I had been aware of it, it would have worked when we were at Mac stock. But TunnelBear has a mode called GhostBear. Are you aware of this? Uh-uh. OK. Well, I'll tell you about it. And this is, you know, they're not currently sponsored, but maybe they will be someday. Sure. Yeah, yeah. No, we've got a lot of these guys. Look, let me make something clear. We have mentioned various companies throughout the episode that either are sponsors of this episode or have been sponsors of other episodes. We only mention them because we're talking about the product that makes sense. You know, we are other than the, you know, whatever it is, two to four minutes of the sponsor spot. That is the only thing for which we are paid to speak. The rest we bring in because we feel it's valuable for you, regardless of whether the company is a sponsor or not. I mean, we're professionals. We're not going to mention something just because people throw money at us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And we've turned down sponsors too, right? I mean, you know, so I just just to make that clear. Like I said, it's really worth listening to this episode 129 of our small business show just to hear deeper into that. But so anyway, go ahead. Yeah, what I what I just read about here, which really intrigued me about TunnelBear and I don't think anybody else does this or at least doesn't advertise it, but they have something called GhostBear. Now, it doesn't seem to be on the iOS client because iOS restricts you from all sorts of things. But on the Mac client, GhostBear is a mode and they call it. And basically what they say, so there's a checkbox. It's unchecked and they say, make encrypted data look more like regular internet data. Oh, wow. So you can probably see where this is going. So what a lot of network security devices, including the one that I think we're at the location we were at, Dave, is something called Stateful Packet Inspection, SPI. And basically they look at traffic, both the port and the type of traffic. And they say, uh-uh, that's a VPN. No go. Right. Right. Well, they have something called GhostBear that apparently will add some fluff, for lack of a better term, to your outgoing data and maybe the port and all that, so it doesn't look like a VPN. Yeah, man. It's just... Right? No, and that's the kind of thing, right. Yes, exactly. And it's kind of the war between you trying to get to the internet and get to Facebook and Twitter and do your thing and people trying to secure their environment and prevent chaos. But I just thought it was so clever, I just stumbled across this feature that is... It's just so clever. So let's disguise our traffic to make it look like not VPN and then we can get to where we're going. So if I'd known about this and I'd enabled it, I may have actually been able to get out with my Mac to my using a TunnelBear. Oh, right. Or you could have just asked me for a login to my Synology VPN and I probably could have given that to you, but... Yeah. I like that. That's pretty good. It's crazy. All right. Now I have no idea where to go. You know what I want to do though, is before we move on to the next topic and we will move on to whatever that happens to be, I want to thank all of the premium supporters that have contributed since we pulled the list for the last show. Now again, we're pulling this list on Wednesday because the 26th, because that's when we're recording this. But on our biannual $25 a month list, sorry, $25 of a six month list, Michael P, Brett P, Mark S, Michael D, Jeffrey M, Buddy B, Howard V, Joe K, Dan B and Mike D. Thank you all for your support. On the $10 a month plan, we have Nick S renewing and Luanne D adding a new account. So thank you, thank you. Oh, and then the $25 account, welcome back Joe K. Really appreciate having you back, man. And on the one-time list, Harvey S whose question we answered earlier in the episode actually contributed five bucks. So thank you to all of you. Every amount helps. It really, really is a huge part of what we do. And frankly, I think it's probably gonna be an even huger part of the Mackie Keb future. So all of you that support us, thank you so much. It really means a lot. We've got some cool stuff found to go through here, John, is that all right? Should we do that? Of course, Scott. Cool stuff found is always. I know, I love it. That's good. All right, that was fun having that router discussion. It's actually been a while. I've been, you know, I avoid the router discussion intentionally because otherwise we could become router geek keb or mesh geek keb or something like that. But anyway, it was fun detouring. So thank you for the request for that. Scott writes, he says, you ever compressed a file in a PDF with quick time compression? It always gets weird and it never works quite right. He recommends something called smallpdf.com. Here you can compress a PDF file without losing significant quality, better than as we mentioned, the quartz filters reduce file size option. The files are not as small as the quartz filters option, but in the few PDFs I have tried in the 25% of the original file size. The site also has other PDF options, including converting other files to PDF. In some cases, I think it does a much better job than Apple's quartz filter and it's smallpdf.com. So we will put a link to all of that in the show notes in the chat room and all of that good stuff. So that's pretty cool. I've never used that. It reminds me though of Zamsar, John. Remember that? Zamsar. Where you can convert all kinds of other files. So we'll put that in. I think Zamsar was the very first cool stuff found we ever mentioned like whatever, you know, nine, 10 years ago whenever we started that segment. So yeah, it's fun. Jed suggests, mentions, includes, he says, this is not a Mac thing, but it's awesome. I've had a problem for a while. I want to listen to podcasts on my Sonos. I can usually find podcasts in the tune-in app. But on my iPhone, I use Overcast and it has a nice little list of unplayed, un-listened to podcasts. How to get to it on Sonos was my problem. I've been playing around with AirPlay through an old Airport Express, AirPlay through Sonos and just plugging my phone into my Sonos 5 to play podcasts. And honestly, nothing has been great. The delay that you get through AirPlay with Sonos is awful. You press a button, count to 20, then it responds. Then I dug around and on GitHub, I found an Overcast Sonos channel. Although there is some delay when first playing an episode, this is far and away better than anything I've tried so far. So for those of you that are Sonos users, we will put this in the, in the show notes and in the chat room so that you too can use Overcast and Sonos together. So do you use, what do you use to listen to podcasts? You don't listen to podcasts, do you, John? I don't even like listening to... To this podcast. To me. Right. Well, I mean, that's, to be fair, it's much worse to listen to yourself than it is to anybody else. It's hard. You got to get, it's a weird thing to get used to is really what it comes down to. I'm not a frequent podcast consumer. So you don't use any, any favorite, you don't have a favorite podcast app, right? Even when I listen to podcasts, I use apples. Use apples. Tools, which are good enough. Yeah, totally, totally. I use, it's either downcast or overcast is what I wound up using. So, all right. And then one last cool stuff found, this actually just came in this morning, or I saw it this morning from Michael. He sent us a link and it's a, it's a Japanese video that shows someone using a mouse dragging an item from their Mac to the Windows PC right next to it. And the mouse just magically, it's like the two screens are connected. And he was able to copy something between these two computers just by dragging with the mouse. I thought, what magic is this? And so I, yeah, I looked and I found it. No, it's the Logitech MX Master 2S. And it does in fact claim to do all of the things that this crazy video shows. And so I'll put a link to the crazy video in the show notes, but I'll also put a link to, to, you know, like an Amazon link to the product. So you could actually buy one of these. It's 99 bucks. I have not tested it. I'm curious to test it. But just like I said, just found out about it this morning. It looks very cool though, this whole concept. And it's not just Mac to PC. It could be PC to PC, Mac to Mac. Whatever, obviously there's some software that you install on the computers that not only talks to the mouse, but creates whatever this thing is. But I don't know, man. It looks pretty magical to me if you watch that video. So we'll put a link in the show notes. It's worth watching. Craziness, man. Craziness, craziness, right? You're watching the video, aren't you? No. No, I'm just, I'm just feeling Japanese. Feeling Japanese, I really think so. Yeah, I knew where you were going with it. Yeah. Yeah. While we're in the, the, the realm of topics about, or products about which we don't have an entirely clear view. I do want to answer Michelle's question and perhaps get some clarity for her that I've been unable to get on my own. She writes, I noticed that recently, TuneUp is once again available for download and purchase. It's called TuneUp relaunch now, just so everybody knows. She says, the trial version did a great job of cleaning up my songs and iTunes. My only concern is that after the relaunch, they're not on any social media and there's no direct way of contacting them that I can find. This makes me a bit leery. No one wants to get caught, right? Are they really back in business? What do you think? So TuneUp was acquired and for those of you that aren't, you know, business savvy with the term acquired, generally when a company is acquired, the company itself is not acquired. Assets from the company are acquired. And I believe that's what happened with TuneUp here. Someone acquired the name and the, you know, probably the code base and all of the stuff that's valuable but didn't inherit any of the, you know, the risks or debts or anything like that. TuneUp relaunch is the outcome of that acquisition. And as Michelle says, and we've heard from others that have used it and it has worked, Michelle hasn't been able to get in touch with anyone there. We've talked about TuneUp relaunch on this show. Every product that we talk about on this show, I send an email off to the company to let them know that we've talked about them. I have not heard back from anyone at TuneUp about this and I've tried several times and not just saying, hey, we talked about you, but hey, I'd like to learn more. Hey, are you there? Like that kind of thing. Maybe I've got the wrong contact information. I don't think I do, but, you know, anything's possible. So if anyone has had any interaction with TuneUp relaunch that you can tell us about, that would be great. So there you go. That's what I, that's what I got, John. Any thoughts about that? I don't know, a business that I'd give money to, I'd expect that they would, you know, provide a reliable presence or detectable presence on the internet. Well, that's kind of the thing, right? But, you know, so we'll see. We'll see what happens. All right. I'd run away, but, you know, that's just me. But the problem is like, you know, if that's truly the best tool to get this done, it used to be the best tool to clean up your iTunes library. And really nothing took its place. So, you know, I get why there is a lot of demand for TuneUp relaunch to be this reliable thing. So there you go. Who knows? All right. Yeah. So, what do we, where are we here? Let's, let's talk about Peter. I think, is that where I want to go? There was one, I feel like there was one question that I kind of wanted to leave us on. Yeah, it's Andrew. So we're going to go to Andrew here. Andrew writes, I don't have a magic answer for this. I do. Okay, great. Awesome. He says, I've been experiencing a problem which has perplexed me and was wondering if you have any suggestions or thoughts. I have a number of iPhones and iPads and I've been updating the applications on these over the air when they're available. There has never been an issue, but recently two and only two of my devices, my iPad and my daughter's iPad have encountered a problem. When we try to update an application, the download begins but the apps then get stuck during the installing phase and the update never completes. The iPads then become unresponsive and freeze. It does not matter what the app is and the updates, all the updates freeze. The only way to recover is to reboot the iPad. After the reboot, the apps successfully download. The strange thing is that it only happens on my daughters and my iPads. My wife's iPad and our respective iPhones can all update the same applications without problem. We all use the same iTunes account for purchases. So I don't think that's the issue. What I have done to troubleshoot, of course I've reset the iPad's network connection back to factory settings. We erased and restored the iPads from backup. That didn't fix it. We signed out of the iTunes account and signed back in. We changed DNS on the iPad to another DNS such as Google's 8.8.8.8. This didn't fix it. And of course, he says I rebooted my router. Here's one other thing I've discovered. I was not able to fix the issue, but then we went traveling. During this time, I spent a week at my sister's place and whilst using her Wi-Fi, the issue did not occur. The iPad successfully updated all the applications without freezing. The same situation happened when we were on the hotel Wi-Fi. I thought the problem had been fixed, but upon returning home and using my Wi-Fi, the problem returned. What stumps me is that the problem only impacts two out of our six iOS devices. Do you have any ideas? Mr. Braun, I'm curious. I've run into this in the past. Me too. I've seen this before. And it's a combination, a good lead in my friend because I think it's a combination of events here. So I think the basic issue here is a corrupt data file or a corrupt application file. OK. Even though it works on some Wi-Fi networks and just not on one? Yes. OK. All right, cool. Yeah, go with me on this. Yeah, I'm going, no, I'm definitely happily. Not totally a stab in the dark here, but I'm sure. So the thing is we talked about in the past. So I think one facet of this is if the application file itself is corrupted, you may run into problems that are not necessarily properly identified by the iOS or it just doesn't work. Sure. Now, we talked about this in our last episode with our friend who had a problem with doing an iPhone backup. And it said, well, it's disconnected, but they lied. And then the real problem was the file itself was corrupt. And when it was trying to do a delta update, which is what an iOS update is, right? As far as I know, it's running into a problem. So suggestion number one, and I've had this work for me. It's upsetting that you have to do this, but delete the app totally and then try to update it again. Probably work. I have had this work for me. So you see it updating, and then it says, eh, I can't update. Or you see the circle trying to do its thing. And then it doesn't quite finish. And it says update again. And it's like, OK, it's stuck in some stupid data corruption loop. Just delete it and try to download it again. It'll probably work. That's one of my answers. The other consideration that I have, Dave, is that, and again, due to your brilliance putting together the agenda, it could be that the Wi-Fi in some places is corrupting the data and causing this problem. Yeah. Yeah. And that even though it shouldn't, even though any data transmission mechanism, whether it be wired or wireless, should be able to detect and correct errors, Wi-Fi from my experience, and I think your experience, tends to be more fragile, especially a single point of presence versus a mesh. So that may be why you're running into this. Only at home. In that your particular Wi-Fi just mangles data in a weird way and causes it at home, but not on the routers. Which typically, when you're at a hotel or stuff like that, typically they're using. You're using a mesh in a hotel. Yeah. Or, well, yeah, I mean, I've scanned. A lot of them use Cisco or some other solution. I don't know if I. I mean, it's mesh. Oh, no, that's definitely mesh because it's one SSID. You can roam throughout the building. I mean, yeah, for sure. I don't know if I technically call it mesh like aero, but it is a distributed Wi-Fi system. And typically, yeah, it's the big boys like Cisco. It's mostly when I scan for the vendor. Ubiquity, Cisco, yeah, exactly. So that's my speculation, is that the file somehow got corrupted, maybe probably due to faulty Wi-Fi, and you just got to wipe it and start from scratch. That's what I got to say, and it's work for me when I have run into this. It's frustrating because it's like, thanks iOS for alerting me to the update, but no thanks for screwing it up. Yeah, right, right. No, I totally agree. Yeah, man. Yeah. Craziness. Craziness. I do like the suggestions here. What has been done to troubleshoot it, but. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. They didn't touch on the fact that somehow, sometimes you just got to start from scratch. Well, and maybe starting from scratch isn't the total answer. I mean, I think in the moment, that's the way to fix it. But, or restarting the iPhone, I mean, that's fixed it for them, too. But maybe not just rebooting your router, but short of replacing it, although you might need to replace it, doing a factory reset on your router, or at the very least doing a firmware update on it, something to change the way that it's talking to those radios, because that sounds like the issue. I agree with you, John. Yeah. I mean, it bothers me, because every protocol, whether it be wired or wireless, should USB, ethernet, stuff like that, should all have CRCs or checksums. I mean, not so much checksums, because that's baby stuff. Yeah, yeah. CRCs are some sophisticated error detection correction that shouldn't allow these sort of things to happen. But I think from what you and I have seen, my friend, wireless communications tend to be more prone to these errors than wired. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah, yeah. Because wireless is black magic. Who knows how it works? Well, we know how it works. But no, no, no. But that doesn't mean that I don't agree with your assessment of it. The problem with wired and the problem with wireless is, yes, we know how it works as long as you're in a closed environment, right? But you have all these things that can interfere with it. And maybe you've got something at home that's interfering with wireless. So who knows? I mean, I don't have the magic answer. The magic answer is you get lead shields surrounding your house. And put them around every. But I mean, what happens if it's something inside your house that's causing you? Well, you put a lead shield around that as well. Whatever that might be. In case of your microwave, anything that can generate RFU, you've got to put a lead shield around it. Yeah, if maybe, like, perhaps it was, you know, like you've got maybe, you know, you said you have your daughter and you and your wife, you mentioned, you didn't mention your sons. But maybe you have a son. But maybe your son didn't join you. Maybe he went off to camp with a friend while the three of you traveled elsewhere. So maybe it's your son that's emanating this Wi-Fi shielding or Wi-Fi interference. So maybe you want to wrap your son in like a lead coat or something, right, John? Is that the? That's it. That's it. Kind of like when you go to the, you know, you go to the dentist. I go to the dentist, right? And, you know, when they do the x-ray, you get the lead apron. Dentist is a total scam. No, it's not. No, I think it would be cheaper. But when they put the lead apron when they do the x-rays, I don't think that's a scam because they want to. No, that's not a scam. No, that's there's science behind that. I just, I think it would be cheaper for us. You know, our teeth aren't supposed to last past about like 35 years, right? I mean, our bodies aren't really supposed to last past 35 years, but they do. But our teeth don't. Right, but here's the thing. I think it would be cheaper to just never go to the dentist. And then when you turn like, whatever, 40 or 45, you just rip out all your teeth and replace them all with implants. And then that would be used, yeah, dentures or whatever you want for the rest of your life. Maybe you got to do it when you're 30. But I still think that's cheaper than a lifetime of routine dental care. All right, I think. If I'm going to get the teeth replaced, I'd rather go for like the James Bond Jaws. Jaws teeth, man. See what I mean? Come on, I mean, if you're going to get artificial teeth, you might as well weaponize them, right? Because you never know when you're in a situation where you're going to have to bite through a steel cable. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I don't know, am I right? That's been my feeling about the dentist for a long time. It's like, yeah, just like save your money and then spend it all on your teeth all at once instead of doing it piecemeal over the years. But Dave, you know, if you want to spend money, and I think this is a worthy cause, there's one place you could spend it, and I'm going to go in reverse here, but you could spend it supporting our premium program. I agree. Just pay the bills, it makes you feel good because you're supporting your two favorite geeks and it makes us feel good because we can pay the bills and we won't be living in a box on the corner. It's hard to podcast from a box. Well, it's possible with wireless technology, but you know, we've told you how unreliable that is. But where does one go to learn about premium, Dave? If you wanted to learn about MacGeekGab Premium, you would go to macgeekgab.com slash premium. That's not. Yeah, that makes sense. And if you are a premium MacGeekGab member, one of the perks that you get is you get to email us at premium at macgeekgab.com. If you're not a premium member, that's okay. We understand that not everybody can be, right? In fact, we understand that most of you cannot be. We would love it if all of you were, but we understand the realities of that. That's totally okay. We have a different email address for everyone to use and that's feedback at macgeekgab.com. And in case you didn't hear that because you know, wireless and other technology is very unreliable, Dave said feedback at macgeekgab.com. No, I said feedback at macgeekgab.com. And really, that brings us to the end. Like I said, we wanna thank all our sponsors for this episode, which includes, of course, Iroh that we mentioned during the episode, but also smile at smilesoftware.com slash geek and otherworldcomputing at macsales.com and barebonessoftware at barebones.com. I also wanna thank Cashfly, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. They rock. I wanna thank all of you just for listening. Doesn't matter whether you're premium or not, being a listener totally helps. Makes a huge difference for us. One last thing, John, that I'd like to say before we all head off here. It's important, though. I think, I mean, I don't know, it's, well, actually, Mr. X sent in something that I wanna play before we end the show. And I think he's gonna encapsulate that which matters to all of us. Don't get caught. May not.