 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 806 for Monday, March 16th, 2020. Thanks, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take all your questions and your tips, you know, your cool stuff found, our cool stuff found with the things that we've learned. We mix them all together and we put them into an agenda. The goal of which is that when we get together, easy for me to say, when we get together every week, we each learn at least five new things. We're all in this together. Sponsors for this week's episode include lino.com slash MGG, Jamf.com slash MGG. They're back very happily. LegalZoom.com and Barebones.com. We'll talk more in detail about those a little bit later. But for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, probably to stay for a little while. No, South by Southwest for me. I'm Dave Hamilton. Yes, and here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. You know what? Let's dive right in. Because Andrew's question is one that has come up in a variety of different ways. And I think we have a new way to approach it. Andrew wrote in and asked us. He said, I'm looking for a multi port USBC hub or dock, whatever you want to call it. And I have been unable to find anything of the sort. Do you know of a high quality one? I have many USBC devices that do not have secondary USBC ports that I could use to daisy chain. So the reality is these things don't exist. And we've talked about this on the show before. But this time I took a slightly different approach. And what I did was I said, well, what do you want to do? Like, what's the reason that you need all these extra USBC ports? Because right now in our in our worlds, you know, it's dongle world, right? You have USBC and that allows us either with the USB protocol or the Thunderbolt protocol to get and add other devices like, you know, USBA ports or Ethernet or HDMI or, you know, whatever we need, drives, you name it. And and he said, yeah, he said, he said, let me read exactly. He says, the issue is that using SSBC SSDs with USBC. I have multiple drives that I want to add because going larger than one terabyte with any one SSD is super expensive. So it in order to have lots of storage hanging off my Mac, I need lots of individual USBC SSDs that are going to hang off my Mac. Like, OK, right, that makes sense. And here's the problem with that. If you got a USBC hub and hung all of these, you know, SSDs off it, where's the power going to come from? And we're going to revisit this a little bit later in the show, too. There's going to be a theme here today. But a USBC hub, how does it know? Like your Mac can only provide so much power across the bus. And USBC is built to deliver power, right? And potentially lots of power. So how do you deal with this? And this is why these devices don't exist, because it's impossible to predict what someone is going to choose to plug in. So you need to limit the number of USBC ports so that you can manage power effectively. And in this case, that's especially true, because SSDs are among the most power consuming highest, but not most highest power consuming devices that you can attach, right? And it's even more so if it's, say, an NVMe drive on a thunderbolt bus, right, because those require more power and they're also like way, way faster. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that. We're revisiting that that issue that I saw in the MacBook Air and others a little bit later in the show. But so to solve this problem, he's right. If you want SSDs or really any storage, you know, you you you you'll you'll probably want multiple drives. And so I started thinking, well, why not a J-Bot, right? We've talked about this before many times. Some single device that you attach to your Mac, either with thunderbolt or USB and they exist in both ways. And then you can put all of your drives in that. Now you don't have to pay for all the extra cases for those drives, the enclosures for those drives, because essentially what a J-Bot is, is it's an enclosure for multiple drives. And then you can sort of do with it whatever you want. And, you know, the thunderbolt one that always comes up, of course, is Otherworld Computing's Thunderbay. They've got their 4B for, I think, 395 bucks or something. And that's, you know, a 4B thing. It's got Thunderbolt 3 so it can do 40 gigabits per second and all that good stuff, which is great. But there are USB J-Bot enclosures that you can use. I've never used them, so I can't really speak to their, you know, effectiveness or reliability. But, you know, Oracle is a brand that makes a couple of them. They've got, you know, that we'll put links in the show notes. And Sabrent is another brand that, I mean, we've used some of their stuff in the past and it's proven to be fairly reliable. And, you know, you can get a 5B one for about 200 bucks. You can get the Sabrent. The Sabrent one I found is, so the Oracle one that I found, and I'll put a link in the show notes, is 5 gigabits per second. So USB 3.0, whatever, Gen 1. And then there is a 10 gigabits per second one for 180 bucks from Sabrent. That's a 4B, but, you know, if you want the additional speed, then that's great. So we'll put links to all of these in the show notes. But I think that's perhaps the right way to think about this is when you find yourself in a scenario where you need to or want to attach multiple USB-C devices, zoom out a little bit and ask, what are those devices and what are the multiple ways that I could solve this problem? Because in this case, a JBod, you know, especially for like 200 bucks, that, you know, that starts to really change the nature of how this is going to go. Those are my thoughts. What do you think, Mr. Braun? I'm actually with you on that. Now, at first I was asking myself the question, well, why not just get a powered USB-C hub? Just like I had, up until recently, I had a, you know, USB-3 of a powered hub. Right. And I could plug as many things in there as I want, but because the power requirements were modest in that world. And predictable, right? Modest, you're right. Yeah, modest is the key there. They couldn't be, you know, 15 watts or something, which these certainly can. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's, I think this would be the way to go, but yeah, it's one way to go. So, yeah. I'll put these links in the show notes so that we've got some things to learn from. It's good. That's good. All right. Let's see. Drake, right? We're moving on to Drake, John? Yes. Okay, cool. Drake asks, he says, I have custom keyboard shortcuts set up via system preferences, keyboard shortcuts, app shortcuts. This is where you can go and add key, like command key, like, you know, like command P to print. You can add those types of shortcuts to any menu command. And this is where you would do it. System preferences, keyboard shortcuts, and then app shortcuts. Then you can set them per app or, you know, system wide. And it's a really handy thing. He says, when I first learned about this, it was very much a cool stuff found. So, and I agree. So there you go. There's a little cool stuff found that you can do this. He says, however, I now work between my MacBook Pro and Mac Mini and have been looking for a way to sync these custom keyboard shortcuts between my Macs. But despite countless Google and forum searches, I have come up empty. So I ask you, my fellow Mac Geeks, do you know of a way to sync these keyboard shortcuts? Or maybe is this a geek challenge? Sadly, I think it's the latter. I like your thoughts, especially, you know, if your fingers get used to doing a thing a certain way, you kind of want that on all of your main devices. But I haven't found a way to sync these, John. Any thoughts from you before we just leave it as a geek challenge? Yeah, when I was researching this one, I mean, doing this on iOS isn't really a bit... iOS seems to be able to pull this off, but Mac OS cannot. Especially if you have a cloud enabled. iOS doesn't have a keyboard shortcut thing. What are you talking about with iOS? Online. Okay. I don't think that's what you mean. There's no keyboard on iOS, so there's nothing to sync. There's no shortcuts. I mean, there are. Actually, that's not true. You can use a lot of sort of your normal Mac app keyboard shortcuts. If you attach a keyboard to iOS, like a physical keyboard that has a command key, when you're in mail and you finish typing a message, if you do command shift D, boom, it will send that email. All of those things exist, but in iOS, there's no way to customize them. At least in Mac OS, we can customize, but we can't sync from Mac to Mac. Okay, no, I know the problem here. The problem is that the Apple's naming convention is kind of confusing. Text replacements will. Agreed, yes. And text replacements will sync amongst... Well, in theory, they will sync to all of your iCloud devices. Macs and iOS devices the same, but yeah, the... Yeah, I agree with you. Apple's naming on this, they missed... Shortcuts has been a thing for a very long time, and so that's why it continues to be named shortcuts, but I'm with you. Shortcuts is a better term for text replacements, but that's a different thing. So unfortunately, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. In the pre-show when we were talking about this, you asked, could Keyboard Maestro do this? And the answer is, sort of. This isn't really what Keyboard Maestro is built to do, but it could do it. You know, with Keyboard Maestro, you build macros, and macros can go and trigger menu items, and you can assign a keystroke to macros. So tying it all together, yes, you could do this, and yes, you can sync your Keyboard Maestro macros amongst all of your Macs. So that would be one way to do it. It's not syncing these, it's not the nice native to the OS experience of these types of command keys, but in theory, I suppose Keyboard Maestro could do this. That'd be, that's one way, I don't know. I don't know, right? Yeah, I saw it suggested in an article I was trying to solve this. Yeah, that may be the only solution. You know, I mean, there might be nothing else, right? So I don't know, I don't know. Anything more on this one, John? No. No, okay. Let's move. So, yes. Let's go to Chris. Okay, go, take us. Yes, please. Get that up here. All right, so Chris had a head scratcher here. Ah, long time listener. I'm at a dead end thinking about next steps for troubleshooting. I'm running on an early 2015 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. Seemingly out of nowhere, but possibly with the 10.15.3 update, an external USB Superdrive stopped mounting disks, audio and other data types. The disk spins up, but it doesn't mount. I experimented with different USB ports, different external drives, SMC reset and VRAM. Now I've realized it's more than just mounting drives because a CAC card reader also doesn't work. I've applied the latest combo updater, USB thumb drives do mount properly as does external spinning hard drives and the SD card reader mounts properly. The Superdrives as well as the CAC reader both show up in the USB system information when connected screenshot attached. And he has bootcamp partition and then the Superdrive mounts properly in Windows. Aha, all right. Well, that's a clue, yeah. But Chris actually found the answer, didn't he? And he shared it back with us, didn't he? Yes, so my speculation, I was like, sounds like it may be a driver thing, I don't know. And I think I was kind of right, depending on how you wanted to find a driver. Right, but yeah, he broke back. And so I threw a couple of suggestions and I guess he tried some of them. It turns out I was combating two issues that are both Catalina related. Catalina no longer reads HFS formatted media, only HFS plus. This was causing my disk reading problems, the dismounted in Windows because it was partitioned with the same data in some Windows format. Aha. And the founding issue and why I thought I had some greater USB problems was that the smart card wasn't working either. It turns out that was also Catalina. It used to be that the built-in Mac OS smart card solution didn't work for my purposes. Well, now it does with Catalina at the same time. Catalina permanently disabled my third party smart card implementation. All very confusing. Huh. So Catalina stops reading HFS disks and only reads HFS plus and APFS of course. So does that mean that Catalina is non-plussed by HFS? Or is that just a really bad twist on words? Sorry. That's a good one. I guess. Yeah. The one thing I was kicking around with you here, I don't know if this would be a potential solution. So there's something called Mac Fuse that lets you read other file systems. Okay. But as we dug into it, it looks like there is an HFS plugin that'll work with this, but it hasn't been touched in years. So I think you may have the same problem. Got it. Got it. Yeah, so there's no way to add HFS support back to the Mac, which makes sense. I mean, why up until now it was unnecessary and other than some lingering old drives that were not HFS plus, I mean, how long what HFS plus is, like that is 20 years old, isn't it? Like HFS plus was from, I'm looking here, in January 19th, 1998. So 21 years old now, if I'm doing, no, 22 years old now doing my math correctly. So yeah, and then, so HFS was prior to that for how long? Yeah, okay. And yeah, HFS was in 85. So HFS didn't exist all that long on its own. Well, I guess that is, I mean, that's what 14 years and so. Yeah, okay. Well, before that you had MFS. Right, yeah, I'd forgotten about that. That's right, yeah, that's right. Yeah, so, but this is a good, I mean, this is a good little heads up for everybody. Make sure that all your, and this is probably just zooming out a little bit. This is a good thing to do in general is if you've got data on, you know, sort of archived data, read that once a year, take an afternoon, a Saturday afternoon, and just go through it all and make sure that your current computer can read that data because if you this, let's say you had some stuff that was HFS and you never really thought about it, and then, you know, this year you go and you plug it in to your thing and you're like, oh, uh-oh, it doesn't read that. Well, at least like today, it wouldn't be all that difficult to find a Mojave machine that could read these things and then you can migrate the data to a newer format or whatever, but if you waited 10 years and realized, oh, I can't read HFS anymore, that's a problem. You're gonna have a real issue, you know, trying to create a machine, especially if it's in the moment that you need or want to get to that data, now you're in sort of a time crunch potentially and trying to solve this, you know, ancient tech problem is essentially what it would become at that time. So this is, and also doing that confirms that your media is still working, you know, your data is in good shape, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, yeah. All right, good, I like it, I like it. Yeah, and then the smart card thing, I guess it was the driver was never updated. Right, okay, well, but it always, okay, so two separate things, the driver for the actual reader was never upgraded, is that what Chris was saying? I think that's it, because if you go into system info, software extensions, there's a column that I don't think was there before and I think it says notarized or something, I think you gotta especially sign, a driver has to be specially signed or else it's not gonna work. Got it, got it. That's a problem with a lot of older stuff is that if the developer abandons it, too bad. Yeah, if it's not updated for Catalina, then you've gotta, it may never work or you might have to do some rejiggering to make it work. Awesome, thank you, Chris. Yeah, so HFS formatted partitions no longer work in Catalina and smart card, CAC users must use native CAC services in Catalina if you'd been using a third party solution that would involve removing the old solution and re-enabling the native solution, so yeah, cool. Thank you for that, Chris, great, great stuff. I have, we have two quick tips and John, I will remind you that these are quick. So the first one is a thing that I shared with a staff member the other day. I have, I run FileMaker and I connect to a remote database and every time my machine goes to sleep, it loses, it drops that connection to that database. I have to re-establish it. So I've started using one of the many pieces of software. I'm using one called Amphetamine. It's available for free, which is why I'm using it, but that leverages macOS's caffeinate terminal command to, but you don't have to use the terminal to keep my Mac awake. And it's awesome because I just said it when I'm get to my desk and I launch FileMaker, I turn on Amphetamine for eight hours and now my screen can go to sleep and all of that stuff. But if I leave to go get like a quick snack or something like that, or I get a phone call, I can come back to my desk and I haven't lost my FileMaker connection. It is fantastic. So I highly recommend if you're thinking, as soon as I mentioned this in one of our meetings, everybody there was like, wait a minute, I could use that for this reason or that reason. So thinking about, you know, when you're sort of having a long stretch of work, it might be worthwhile to tell your Mac, yeah, for, you know, the next whatever, two hours, four hours, eight hours, whatever it's gonna be, don't sleep, super handy. So Amphetamine, that's my quick tip. I know it's a cool stuff found, but the use case is the quick tip. So, and then John, you found one, we found one this morning, prepping for the show. John. Yeah, yes, I'm here. Hey. And yeah, I ran into this last week, I was trying to read something that you had put in Evernote and the color was terrible. It was like this light blue against white and it was just really hard to read. The quick tip here is male, preferences, font and colors, and there's gonna be a choice, color-coded text. Pick something else, we picked something else. Their choice of teal, I don't think is that great. That great, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's just a light color and a light background, just a no. So I don't think they made a good choice or you could just uncheck that box and then all the text will be whatever your normal text color is. Right. And this isn't an Evernote thing. It's a, what we do is we read PDFs of your emails here. So if you're making PDFs with mail or printing with mail to a color printer, this is where these colors actually matter. They also appear on screen when you're viewing mail too. So perhaps forget about PDFs maybe just on screen, it's even better for you too. So yeah, sweet, good stuff. I like it. I wanna take a minute and talk about our first two sponsors if that's okay with you, my friend Mr. Braun. Yes. All right, look, taxes, right? That's one thing we all have to deal with this time of year and if you're a business owner like I am or just somebody with a family and things like that get a little complex going on, it's critical to know all your options. And this is where LegalZoom is here for all of us to lean on. They have a ton of resources to help, including, this might even be the best part, their network of independent attorneys and tax professionals, right? 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Not an episode goes by where something about the speed benefits of SSDs isn't included and here we are again. Everything, even their $5 a month Nanode server runs on SSDs and I've got a deal where you can get a $20 credit to start so that means you get four months for free but they also nowadays are offering for a limited time free migration to Linode. Linode Professional Services does a free cloud migration of your business workload so that you can get migrated to Linode. So go check this out. Go to linode.com, L-I-N-O-D-E dot com slash M-G-G for your $20 credit to get started. Thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. It's time for some follow-ups for previous episodes and we'll start with Allison. In show 804, we were talking to listener Chris and he asked about whether he should learn AppleScript to work with Automator and Allison says, I'm not sure I'd recommend that now that Apple will let you use JavaScript inside Automator. She says, it breaks my heart because I know how beloved AppleScript is but it doesn't seem like it's the future. She says, I took the class where a Robertson taught at Command D and loved it but I think it's heyday is over. If you already know AppleScript, like I know many of you do, then of course go for it but I think for someone new it's maybe not the best place to start in 2020. She says, Bart Buschatz did a thing on this just last week for Allison's chit chat across the pond where Bart showed some very simple examples of using JavaScript inside of Automator to make quick actions to modify text with services and he's rewritten all of his scripts from using Perl to JavaScript for now. So we'll put a link to that little segment there that Allison mentioned from her show, from Silicast. But yeah, I'm with you Allison, it pains me too but I think with Apple's direction aiming towards shortcuts and that sort of thing, honestly I'm not even sure that Automator has a long future either but certainly AppleScript is I think saying that it's heyday is over and probably not the right thing to start a new with in 2020. I think you're probably right. As sad as that is, now with Salsa going and gone from Apple, he was, AppleScript was, as I understand the lore and this is not anything confidential but as I understand, without Sal at Apple, AppleScript probably would have been canceled a very long time ago. So I think now that Sal has been gone for a couple of years from Apple, I mean he's still in the community and he's still a fantastic resource in the community but now that he's not at Apple to kind of twist arms and do all the things that Sal does, I don't know that he ever actually twisted someone's arm, that was meant to be a figure of speech. If you know differently, perhaps just keep that to yourself but yeah, I think you're right Allison. JavaScript that way more widespread use too as well if once you've learned JavaScript for the Mac, now it sort of applies on the web and in many, many, many other places. So thank you for that. Good stuff Allison. Thoughts Mr. Ryan? The good news is you can do both within Automator Dave. Correct. Yeah, cause I just found the help article in Automator and it says, oh in addition to AppleScript, Automator supports JavaScript for automation, hooray. Well, that's what she was saying. She said Bart used JavaScript inside of Automator to do all these things. I see, and then he redid it, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it's a good thing. Yeah, it is. From show 805, which is last week's show John, you were talking about how you could not get your sensor to, or your iStat menus to show you your ambient light I think is what it was. And Mark from Bajango, the company that makes iStat menus, listened to the segment and wrote in, he says on that 16 inch MacBook Pro as it stands, we don't think we have a way to show info from the True Tone sensor. If we find a way, he says we will add support. So there's that. And then also in that episode, he says I do have a bit of a correction. Sometimes he says we update the version on our website prior to making the update available to everyone via the built in update checker. And he says this is for two reasons. Number one, to stage the rollout of updates so we can be absolutely sure we have a solid release by letting people that wanna download it sort of manually from the website get it first. If there's a problem, it hasn't now just been pushed out to everybody that's got the app. That's not a bad thing. And number two, he says to be able to fix bugs and provide a quick turnaround for customers that are experiencing issues. They don't have to wait for the next update. We can often just give them a link to the new build. So he says currently the version, and this was as of six days before the show was released. So it's possible that this has changed. But he says, as of that moment, the version that you can download from the website has the 16 inch MacBook Pro and AirPods Pro support, but they have not pushed that update to customers yet. So John, you may just wanna make sure that you get the version from the website so that you have full support for the MacBook Pro. Although, as he noted, it still won't have support for the TrueTone sensor because they have not found a way to read from that yet. Oh yeah. Yeah, and the way I found is I think the person who pointed this problem out to us and I confirmed is that you downloaded again. Otherwise you just see one sensor. Right, right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right, cool. And then also from 805, we were talking about what to do to get service if you're traveling to Europe once we're able to travel to Europe again. And Darius wrote in and says, perhaps I could add my two cents or two pence to Kevin's question. Darius from the UK says, if I were in his shoes, I'd buy an O2 SIM for one pound and then top it up by a bundle with unlimited calls, unlimited text and a data allowance. He says there's a 15-pound bundle that gives six gigs or a 20-pound bundle that gives 10 gigs. Top-up is easy via mobile or online using my O2 and he gave us some links to share. He says, for as long as the UK is still in the EU, you can use the same SIM and plan across the whole of the EU under free roaming. He says, so if you travel with the phone to France, for example, you won't incur roaming charges. He says this will unfortunately cease next year when all of that changes. He says, additionally, using O2, a nice feature whilst in London, O2 provides free Wi-Fi on the London Underground as well. And he says, so there on Wi-Fi, I would use FaceTime or WhatsApp to call abroad. So yeah, great. Thank you for that, Darius. Great advice, always like to have current stuff, which is how, that's what we do here. So, sweet, thank you. Thoughts on that before we move on to Scott here, John? No. Okay. Scott, we talked in 802 about troubleshooting networks and Scott has some sort of, well, will Scott tell us? Hey, John and Dave, this is Scott. I know I'm a little behind, I'm listening to number 802, so if you have some solutions found, you can ignore this. On the checking for speed, internet related speed, some of the things that whoever it is needs to check is a number of things can get in the way. First of all, if you have a smart hub or a dumb hub or hub of any type, you may wanna check the hub to make sure that it's working properly. Take out the hub, I've had hubs go bad for whatever reason, even if you reset it, make sure that there's nothing wrong with it. For some reason, these things seem to go bad, I don't know, same thing with cables. You have to check cables. In fact, one of the issues I have found in dealing with particularly Comcast on the cable related issue is certain noise that can come across cable. That's why cables are rated the way they are. Make sure you're using a minimum of cat fry E for the cable. Otherwise, sometimes for higher speeds, you get a little extra noise bouncing around in there and that tends to mess up switches, routers, whatever is also in the way. So it's check the switches, check the cabling also. And if that's not the case, then do for Mac a full SMC reset. What is that? That's command, the PR, when you boot the system, that's the PRM reset. I don't know why, I don't know what's in there, but one time I did that on a Mac and it opened things up. I would do that as the last choice. I would do the cable, the switches and the routers first and then reboot and do the command PR last. Those are the things that I found. If that's not it, then it could also be internal to the cable modem and that's a whole other story. Otherwise, I have nothing else for you guys. Sorry, bye and don't get caught. Oh yeah, good advice. Thank you, Scott, good stuff. A couple of things about that. Number one, bad hubs, what a great or bad switches I guess is what we're using these days for the most part. If you're still using a hub for ethernet switch, change that over to a switch, way more efficient, but I have had, I have seen hubs or switches go bad, probably more frequently than I've seen cables go bad. These things, they operated a pretty hot environment, like just having all that, whatever circuitries in those things tends to heat up, even if they're not providing power over ethernet or anything, if they are then especially so. Yeah, so think about that. If you are having internal network issues, you may well have a bad hub. And then in terms of the SMC reset, that's actually done a little bit differently. That's not, well, depending on your machine, it might require holding down some keys or it might just be unplug and leave it on a desktop. It's unplugged for 15 seconds, plug back in, wait five more seconds, then turn it on. That does it on a desktop. On laptops, you have to hold down some keys and it depends on which laptop. We'll put an article to that. The command option PR that he mentioned is also a good reset. That resets your NVRAM or we used to call it the PRAM, which is why it's command option PR. You do that while the Mac is booting up right. As soon as you hear the startup chime, you hold those down, you wait until you hear the startup chime again or until the Mac just reboots again if you don't have startup chime on your Mac and then you move on. Thank you for that, Scott. Any thoughts from you, Mr. Braun? Yes, we weren't able to get to this question, I think in a prior episode, but I just dug it up here. In that same vein, listener Michael identified an issue that was causing his network to run slow. Okay. Never guess what it is. Well, I'll tell you what it was. At some point, he bought a wall socket that had spike protection, I guess. Well, apparently, sockets can degrade over time. And that was it. Apparently, it degraded to the point where it was introducing noise into the power line and that was freaking out his equipment, so. Really? Man. Yeah. All the play, well, how did he find that? Like good catch. He backtraced all the way back to, okay, I replaced that, I replaced that. It's like, well, how about where you're plugging it into? That sucks. I mean, it's great, but man. Yeah, another thing could be a bad ground or polarity. So I actually got one of these. You should be able to get one of these at Home Depot or any store that sells electrical stuff. Sure. But it tells you if your ground is good and if your polarity is correct, that could also be another cause, kind of related to what he said. If you can find a link for one of those on Amazon or something that's more universal, please put that in the show notes so that people know what specifically you're talking about and what, I just want an example of one of those. That would be great. Oh man, gosh. Yeah, yeah. Huh. Yeah, what a good find by Michael. I don't know how long it would take me to decide that that might be my issue. I mean, it's hard to say, right? Cause I haven't done any of those things, but man, that is not something, I take it for granted that power from the wall is not going to be the thing sort of messing with my environment, or at least I took it for granted. Now I won't anymore, thanks to Michael, which is good. So. Okay, yeah, I found one here for seven bucks, which I think is what I found. Yeah, so it checks your polarity, the ground fault status. Great. Could be another thing. All right. Awesome, yeah, put that in the show notes and we'll all go, we'll all just go buy it because I know I will, so there you go. While we're at it, in the last episode, I included this cool stuff found the one, what yet another, and I've got one more coming in this episode too. Yet another Thunderbolt SSD that Thunderbolt 3 SSD is we're kind of exploring these and learning about them. And Walter pointed out the one that I mentioned last week was Otherworld Computing's Envoy Pro EX. And Walter said a big note about the Envoy Pro EX, it is not compatible with the 2018 Mac Mini. He says, I found this out the less than easy way. It is mentioned on Otherworld Computing's webpage in the compatibility specs section. But he says, being that both the Envoy Pro EX and the 2018 Mac Mini are relatively bleeding edge, I was surprised at the incompatibility and I know that you guys have these new Mac Minis, which is true, so I thought it might be worth a mention. You are absolutely right, Walter, it's worth more than a mention. It's worth some digging, and so I did that. And I checked in with our friends at Otherworld Computing to find out why. I figured if they're acknowledging this on their website, they probably, I mean, it's OWC, they have the answer. I have the answer because they shared it. And they say, the problem stems from a conflict with the Wi-Fi chip set. If Wi-Fi is disabled on the Mac Mini, then the drive works fine, not an ideal solution, but it is a workaround. So I said about testing this. Because for two reasons, one, I was just curious, I wanted to see how it behaved and failed, but I also wanted to make sure I saw how it failed because Otherworld Computing is great about testing their own stuff and being very forthcoming with that information. I'm not so sure about every other vendor that we're talking about here. And so I wanted to see how the OWC drive failed and what it looked like when it failed and how quickly and how frequently and all of that stuff so that I could do that same test with all these others. And it fails pretty quickly, at least in our experience. You plug the drive in, it mounts, you can do speed tests on the drive, whatever, it's happy, good to go. Within about certainly less than 10 minutes, it falls offline. You get the little notice that says you should have ejected the drive properly, but by the time that notice comes up, the drive has remounted. So it's a very quick reset that happens. And then the drive is there again. Of course, it's completely non-optimal and really not the right way to go if this is the kind of thing that you need to do. Turning off Wi-Fi eliminates that, but it's a recurring thing. It happens many times an hour. So it's like, okay, good, we can test these things now. And we are and we will. So thank you, Walter, thank you to OWC for the information, very, very handy. Good, all right. And now on to that cool stuff found because as I said, I do have another drive to test and this one does not appear to suffer from this same issue. So they must be using a different chipset as OWC or maybe some shielding or something like that. And that is the G-Drive Mobile Pro SSD. I've been testing the one terabyte version. It's 379.99. And it gets those 2,000, higher than 2,000 megabyte per second writes higher than 2,300 megabyte per second reads. It's actually, it's a really nice looking drive. You know, it's that G-Drive stuff, right? I mean, it's worth looking at the pictures, but it's kind of got some, it's a metal enclosure. It's got the fins in between the fins. It's got like a little blue hue kind of going on, not a light, but just a blue reflective kind of hue. Separate Thunderbolt 3 cable that it comes with. So you could in theory use a longer one if you wanted, but it's a, you know, I think it's a one meter cable I think that it comes with if I'm guessing correctly. And nice little drive and like I said, tests out well. So like the many of the other ones, it is Thunderbolt 3 only. It is not, even though it uses a USB port or USB-C shaped port, it is Thunderbolt only. So, you know, it won't work on like a MacBook that has USB-C ports that are not Thunderbolt. So, but great little drive. I like this one too. Like I said, we're going through each of these sort of individually and then we'll call us them all and give you kind of a comparison chart in a couple of weeks here of all the, you know, the various drives that we've tested and all that good stuff. So, good. Any questions on the Mac mini thing, the G-Drive or whatever? I do want to follow up on our Thunderbolt USB connection issue that I started talking about two weeks ago. I've dug very deep into that, John, but just wanted to, yeah. Cool. Any questions on these drives or the Mac mini thing before we move on? Nope, nope. So, we did mention a couple of weeks ago the thing that John and I had seen on my MacBook Air while in Las Vegas. And that was that the order in which I plugged devices into the USB-C ports on my Air mattered. Specifically, if a Thunderbolt drive was plugged in, a Thunderbolt device of any kind, at least from my tests, was plugged in first, the system would see it as a Thunderbolt device. If it was plugged in second, the system would not. Now, I was happened to be testing when we were in Las Vegas with the Las C-Rugged SSD Pro. I might be saying those words in the wrong order, but that's their version of these drives that we've been talking about here. But theirs is a Thunderbolt 3 drive, but the chips that they use falls back to USB 3 if it can't negotiate Thunderbolt. And so that's exactly what would happen. But with, say, this G-Drive and the OWC Envoy Pro EX, they just don't mount until you unplug the other device that's plugged in to the other USB-C port on the MacBook Air and then these devices mount. So I dug and I went and checked out the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The folks at Mac Edge locally here let me kind of go and play with their machines because they have lots of them. And I realized that this problem is far more likely to occur on a two-port machine than a four-port machine. And the reason for that, as I've done some digging here and talked to various little friends and birdies and all of that stuff, is that, say, on the MacBook Air, there is one Thunderbolt bus, okay? And the first device can get 15 watts of power. The second device connected can get seven and a half. That's how the bus works. And these problems that we're talking about are these symptoms, I don't want to say it's a problem, these symptoms that we're talking about are a function of things that happen only when the device is on its own internal battery power. If it has external power, none of these issues exist because there's power coming in. So it's very much related to power. So the first device can get 15 watts. The second device can only get seven and a half. This is why the second device generally cannot be negotiated at Thunderbolt because Thunderbolt, especially for an SSD, is going to request three amps, which is 15 watts, right? So, or close enough. So on the MacBook Air, which has one Thunderbolt bus, that's what happens. Now, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and even the 2015 MacBook Pro, 2016 MacBook Pro, I think we checked this with two, same thing has four USB ports or four Thunderbolt 3 ports, I should say, but they're split into two buses, one on either side of the Mac. However, power is shared amongst those. The best case is to split devices amongst buses, but if you don't, the way Apple has engineered these things, you can still get 15 watts on the second port that you plug something into, but not the third. So even though you could plug two Thunderbolt drives in on the left side of the MacBook Pro, and it will take it because it's essentially borrowing power, it's better to say sharing power from what it would assign to the other bus, but the other bus now can only do seven and a half on the next, on the third port that you plug into. So the net of this is all very confusing because it leads to a very confusing user experience, because if you plug, let's say you have a USB hub, like a travel hub or a travel dock, whatever you want to call it, and then a Thunderbolt drive, like that's a realistic scenario that you could travel with. If you plug the Thunderbolt drive in first, and then plug the USB hub in, the Thunderbolt drive gets its full power, so it mounts as a Thunderbolt drive. The USB hub is sort of, it's gonna ask for more power in most cases because it knows it might need it for other devices you're about to connect, but it will negotiate down, so it will work, assuming you don't plug in anything downstream of that that's gonna pull power. But if you plug the Thunderbolt drive in first, USB hub second, they both mount up exactly like you would expect. If you plug them in in reverse order, they don't, and it's just an idiosyncrasy of the way this works. Now, sometimes you will get an error message saying this device is asking for more power than you need. That would happen in the case of like the G drive or the OWC Envoy Pro EX, the Thunderbolt only drive, but the Le C drive that is Thunderbolt or USB, you don't get that message because the drive says, I want 15 Watts and the system says, I don't have it. And so the drive says, cool, can I have seven and a half? And it says, yeah. And it's like, all right, great, I'll go USB for you. Which is a great user experience in the sense of mounting the drive, but not so great if you were expecting it to be at Thunderbolt speeds and you don't test it the moment you plug in the drive, you might wind up with it running slower. Like you and I saw in Vegas when we tested that drive that time. So the net of all this is that Apple actually has done quite a few very interesting things to attempt to give you the power that you need without setting you up for failure with like brownouts and protecting you against those things, which is good. The reality of it is you need to take the devices that you're gonna use, especially in a battery operated scenario and plug them in at home when you're not in that crunch and figure out what the right order is, the right devices are to use and learn where it works great and where you're gonna run into these power related problems. Because as we were saying at the beginning of the show, USB-C creates a very interesting set of power demands. And that's just a reality of it. That's why we don't have, you know, a USB-C hub with say six USB-C ports on it. It's like, well, are each of them gonna ask for seven and a half watts? And if so, what's that gonna do upstream? Can you provide that? We don't know, like, that's where this stuff gets really, really. And then you would say, well, that hub stinks. You know, it's no good because it can't provide the power that I need. It's like, well, it's not the hub's fault. It's upstream from that. So this is where it gets all very interesting. Like I said, you know, it's, but there you go. So my advice is take the devices that you have, spend, you know, an hour on a Saturday afternoon, plug them in, use system information, which is an app that you can launch. It's in the utilities folder and applications or if you hold down the option key and go to the Apple menu, you can launch it right from there. And look, when you attach these things, look in the USB section, look in the Thunderbolt section and learn how your devices all interact with each other so that you can kind of just move forward and have a good experience. Thoughts on that, John? You think I'm crazy? Wait, don't. No, I actually confirmed this. Okay. I was like, oh, how can I confirm this? I don't have any Thunderbolt drives. Sure. I do. Okay. Target disk mode is my Thunderbolt drive. And I had a different, I had a slightly different experience. So Target disk mode lets you mount your Mac as a hard drive on another Mac. And there are two protocols that it uses. And so when you start up in target disk mode, it'll show you a Thunderbolt icon and a USB icon because you can do either one of those. Right. Here's the good news. When I put one of mine in target disk mode and then saw it mount on the other and then I use that fancy cable that I told you about a couple of weeks ago. Yes. Yeah. It came up as Thunderbolt. Right. Within system info, but at 20 gigabits per second. Now it's funny because that cable doesn't advertise itself as a Thunderbolt. It is. Okay. It's the first Thunderbolt connection I've ever seen. Now, if I plugged it in later, it would connect via USB target disk mode and the disk would not mount. I would, it would prompt me for a password. But when I typed it in, it would do the nuh, you know, like head shake thing. Interesting. So 20, 20 gigs could be a function of just the either device on either side, but it also, and I'm pulling this out of my head. So somebody please correct me if I'm wrong. And I'm pointing to all you folks in our chat room at live.matkeakab.com. Thunderbolt cables, Thunderbolt 3 cables can either be active or passive. And I believe active cables, they cost a little bit more, can pass 40 gigabytes per second and gigabits, sorry. And passive past 20. So it's possible your cable is capable of doing passive Thunderbolt 3. And I'm hoping somebody, it's gonna check me on this. I don't know. It's crazy. There's, you know, that's the crazy part about all this. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 40 gigabytes, gigabits. Sorry. I don't wanna keep saying gigabyte type. I'm so good about that up until now. Bad. Bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, passive Thunderbolt 3. I'm confirming this here. And they say that active Thunderbolt cables generally can only be a half a meter. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, passive cables longer than 0.5 meters feature only 20 gigabits per second of connectivity. Whereas, yeah. That's the reason. Okay. So I think it's a three-foot cable. Yeah. So it probably is a passive Thunderbolt 3 cable. I don't know. It seems like there might be some longer active cables too, but they'll cost a lot more. So it has something, I don't know. There's more to this. That we're gonna have to get back to you on. Yeah, so there you go. Fun. But hopefully that helps. Really the reality is, you know, because there's so much power, there's so much variance in the power requirements of the different devices that you can connect to these things. You just need to test it out before you're in that crunch situation and figure that out. So there you go. It looks like there might be a Cal-Digit active Thunderbolt 3 cable that can do two meters. Now it's gonna cost you 60 bucks to do this, but it does exist. So I will put this in the show notes and we'll go from there. So good. Yeah. It's fun. I love this stuff. I mean, you know, kind of, I mean, no, I do. It just, it gets, it gets crazy. I want to take a minute and talk about our next two sponsors before we go into some more cool stuff found in Quick Tips. How's that sound to you, John? Please do. All right. I'm happy to bring Jamf Now back on board here into the Mackie Gev family as a sponsor because Jamf Now makes it easy to set up, manage, and secure all of your Apple devices. Jamf Now at J-A-M-F dot com slash M-G-G is a mobile device management system and their security helps you sleep a little bit better at night, right, because it can be set. You can use it to set on all of your mobile devices, all the devices you manage. You can set it to enforce passcodes and encryption. You can use it to remotely lock or wipe a device and Jamf Now ensures that you have the MDM security settings that you need so that all of your Apple devices and the information on them is untouchable just the way you want it, right? You can place a device in lost mode, you can remote lock, you can remote wipe, as I said, from anywhere, from anywhere. As long as you've got a web browser, you are good to go so that you can focus on your business instead with no IT experience needed at all. And we have a deal because you're a Mac GeekGab listener. I gave you that URL before, the jamf.com slash M-G-G because you can start securing your business today, setting up your first three devices for free. And then you can add more, starting at just two bucks a month per device. So go create your free account today. What are you waiting for? Like it's free and the first three devices like are always free. It doesn't matter what three they are, right? As long as you got three or less in there, it's free and then more than three you pay for at starting at just two bucks a month. So go create your free account today at jamf.com slash M-G-G, that's J-A-M-F.com slash M-G-G or thanks to Jamf now for sponsoring this podcast. Be bein' it. Yeah, that's our next sponsor here and it's a tool that's up and running on my Mac right now, I don't even have to look because I'm always running BBEdit. Whether I'm starting it from the command line because you can do that, you can set it up so that when you're in the terminal, you can type BBEdit space and then a file name and it will open in BBEdit. That's way easier than editing something in the terminal. Have you ever tried that? Do you like VI? Some people do, I actually, like I learned it. I don't wanna say that I like it, but I learned it. It's fine, BBEdit's way easier to edit in and it's way more powerful because I can do all the stuff and it allows me to sort of have everything in one place. Not sort of, it allows me to have everything in one place. This is what I love about BBEdit and then I can do all of my stuff. I can compare documents right there, I can see them on the screen, I can actually even sort of scroll through the very detailed changes, see what they are, apply changes back and forth between the two documents that I'm comparing, I can do multi-file, find and replace. You ever have to do that? That's a pain in the neck, except it's not with BBEdit. You wanna count the words in a document? Sure, no problem. And if you're doing some coding, well, even better because BBEdit is totally built for that. That's actually what it was originally built for but it does all these other things now too because it's so smooth that the way it does them all, manipulating, editing, viewing, just dealing with all the text files in our lives. You gotta check this out. You can go, you can actually go on the App Store if you want because BBEdit is in the App Store, they have a brand new subscription model available there in the App Store or you can just go get it at barebones.com. In fact, I think that that's where you should go. Go to barebones.com, you can download the full featured trial and you get all the features for 30 days and then after 30 days it sort of ratchets back. You can decide whether that's enough for you or if you need more and if you need more then you can either buy the perpetual license from barebones.com or you can buy it through the App Store with your subscription and then you can go to merch.barebones.com and where your BBEdit spirit with pride like I do. So go check it out, go to barebones.com and our thanks to Barebones and BBEdit for sponsoring this episode. Dave, I'm all about USB-C. Okay, same. It's great. I love this world that we live in. Yeah, so anyway, so in one of my feeds, they posted a deal for, it's the JARV PPS Wireless Exec PD 10,000 milliamp hour power bank with 10 watt wireless charging and Type-C 18 watt power delivery. Well, what are you talking about here, John? So anyway, so it's a battery. Micro USB is used to charge it. It has a USB-A port for your old stuff so you can charge other stuff. And then here's the cool part. It has a USB-C port that can both let you charge it or charge other things. So it goes both ways. Oh, it's also a cheat charger. Nice. Wow. That's cool. And here's a link. When I got it, they had like a manufacturer rebate I got it for like 22 bucks here. The price now is a little higher and actually the best price that I've seen is from B&H, not Amazon. Amazon, you'll pay $50 retail. Okay. So get it from B&H if you want one of these. Yes, that's a good idea. But I thought it was pretty handy. That's pretty cool. Have you tried it yet with your MacBook Pro to see if it will power your MacBook Pro? Yes, well, it will. Let me see what happens when I plug it in. Yes, yeah, we'll say charging. Okay. So if I plug it into the MacBook, it's like, oh, okay, you want me to charge this? So it's smart enough to know that yeah, the MacBook Pro shouldn't be charging it. Well, so that's an interesting thing. I haven't tested this one, but in a general sense, you know, like I really like that we live in a world now where I can carry a battery with me that can, you know, top up my laptop. That's awesome. And I've tested lots of them. I've tested them from my charge. I've tested them from Anchor. I've tested them from, I think Life Proof has one too. And there, my experience has been that they're all a little bit wonky and I'm not convinced it has anything to do with the power bank. I think it might be the Max, but I could be wrong about this, right? But the sometimes I plug it in and it's like, cool, I'm charging. Sometimes, like my Mac says, cool, I'm charging. Sometimes I plug it in and nothing happens. It's as though it's not plugged in. Sometimes the Mac starts charging the power bank and other times it's this flip-flop back and forth between the Mac charging versus the Mac being charged. And it's not perfect is really what I've come to figure out. And so I just have to be really sort of conscientious about, all right, I'll look, I'll plug it in. It does my Mac start charging within the first whatever, five seconds, whatever, it might take a few seconds. And it depends, I find if the power bank has a button on it, sometimes hitting the button, like the button that would show you the charge level or something, that often puts it into powering mode. And again, they're all sort of different, but it's sort of just like I was saying in the last segment, you kind of have to learn how to jigger things to make this, you know, USB-C-based power go the direction that you want it to go. But so I'm curious if you ever run into that with this one, you know, I've had them, at first I thought, honestly, I thought the life-proof one that they had given me to test out was bad. They sent me a new one because the anchor one that I was using worked out great. And then I realized, no, it was just luck of the draw. It just so happened that when I plugged the anchor one in, I had it in the right mode and my Mac was in the right mode and, you know, I got lucky. And now I've realized they're all a little bit, it's, you gotta hold your mouth just right to get it to work. But it does work, just know that it might take, you know, unplug it, push the button on it, plug it back in, don't push the button, plug it back in, it just depends. It's fun. Yeah, this one I have to press the button so that it'll recognize that there's a Qi device when I wanna charge my phone. Okay, yeah, there you go. Yep, yep, makes sense. Yeah, you know, I didn't, they could even come with a manual. I have to read the manual. Yeah, good luck with that. See if there are more modes that I don't know about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool, all right, Seth shared, no. Seth shared, easy for me to say, three quick tips with us. Really they came from, I think it's Matt Birch Tree, I wanna say, but birchtree.me and it was a great little article that was essentially Mr. Birch Tree and I'll figure out what his first name is. It's either Matt or Michael, I can't remember. It is Matt, oh, sorry, not Matt Birch Tree. His site is birchtree.com. It's Matt Birchler. So he had just gone around his office and sort of asked people to show him the cool things or what they knew and essentially he went mining for quick tips, which is a great thing to do. We recommend everybody do this. And he came up with three. The first was that a lot of people didn't know how to know if you could scroll in the Finder and most folks said, well, to figure out if I can scroll in the Finder or any app, I just attempt to scroll and if it scrolls, then I know that I can. Well, that's not the best use of our time. So my advice to everyone, and I do, this is very much a Dave centric point of view, go to system preferences, go to general, go to show, scroll bars and change it to always. It does take up a little bit of space on the right side of your windows, but now you always know, hence the always, whether you can scroll and where you are in the scrolling. It's super handy. I find it, I find it well worth spending that little, you know, whatever it is, 20 pixel little bit on the side of my thing. Do you have that turned on yours, John? I'm pretty sure I do, yes. Yeah, yeah, it's a handy little thing. So thank you for that, Seth. The next one was that he found that most people did not know that you could preview screenshots or really many other files, most other files I'll even say, by hitting the spacebar using what Apple calls, quick look, then you can do this, not just in the Finder, but in file dialogues and things like that. I find it super handy if I need to attach an image to something like a screenshot or, you know, whatever. While I'm in that dialogue, you know, for it navigating to my folder and finding it, it's like, I can't tell by the little thumbnail if that's the image I want. So I just hit the spacebar and boom, up it comes. So another great little tip. Thank you, Seth. And the third one, a lot of people did not know that you can right click on a single button mouse. Now that's a bit of a lie because there, if the mouse doesn't have a second button, you can't actually right click, but you can approximate the right click by holding down the control key and clicking to get that alternate menu or whatever else it was. So I know most of us probably have mice that have two buttons or have the, you know, magic sensors on them or whatever it is. But that is a handy thing to remember, control click, especially in those moments where your mouse is sort of acting wonky or your trackpad and you can't get the two fingers to work the right way. Never forget, control and click will give you that alternate menu. So thank you for those three, Seth. It's great stuff. And I put a link to that birdstreet.me post about it as well. Good, John? Yes. Yeah, okay, cool. Oh, I figured one thing out about my new MacBook Pro. Yeah, man. But I didn't realize. This is why you should read the manual. Apparently this trackpad has force touch. I didn't know that when I first got it. Right, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you have the other machine. Older machine did not have that. Right. Have you played with force touch on it at all? Yeah, okay. Now, like if you do it in the finder and you hold down on something that'll do a quick look. Yeah, that's right. That's another way to go for it. Nice little quick tip. Very good. Cool, cool. We have, I think we might be able to get through these. Scott asks us, he sent us a very panicked message, which is fine. And he says, my business ended up at a location where it will take a month to get internet service. I'm stuck. Everything in the world is online and I need connectivity. Ironically, there is a cell tower across the street, about 50 yards from my door. Are there companies that still offer MiFi type services or devices? I can't seem to find anything like it. What about a router that assumes the back hall is a cellular network? Any help, advice, and sage words would be appreciated. Yes. So if I can't solve this problem, I'm screwed. I get you, I feel you. So the answer is all of the above is at your fingertips. The, there are, we looked, there are some MiFi type advices, essentially devices, not advices. Essentially a MiFi is a device that is a hot spot that it connects to your, to the internet via cellular. So I think Verizon was the first one to market the device that was called the MiFi, but it's just a portable hot spot, essentially. Of course, we may all find ourselves using these types of things if it turns out that 5G is better than, say, having a cable modem. We might have exactly that in our homes and not so portable. But the idea is that these exist, and they do, they're somewhat pricey, especially for the scenario you're describing where you only need it for a month or two. But I think Verizon has one that you can buy for 50 bucks and then you just add service to it, you know, and you're good to go. You're paying for the service no matter which way you go with any of these solutions, obviously. So that's one way. The other way is you could use your phone as a standalone hot spot, or you could use an old phone as a standalone hot spot. Right? If you have an old iPhone, as long as you connect it to service that allows that, that would work. That would be fine. And also you could get an old or inexpensive Android phone if you don't have an iPhone. If you've got a phone, then, you know, it's essentially free if it's extra. But if you don't have a phone, Android phones can do this too. They have the same, you know, guts essentially and so good to go. All right, so fine, great, no problem. Or you mentioned routers. And Synology's routers, the RT2600AC and the RT1900AC let you set up, they call it a second connection, but if you don't have the first, then it is the first. You can set up a second connection on a USB-based connectivity device. And this is built for exactly the scenario where you are pulling in the internet via a cell signal. And the cool part about the way Synology does it is you can also set this up as your backup or to spread the load of the connection. You can configure that in the router. It's actually fairly straightforward. So you set this up and you can say, cool, use my, you know, let's say cable modem or whatever, my ethernet-based internet access when that's available. But if and when that fails, immediately fall over and go with this cell signal. And then that way, you always have connectivity even if there's some issue with the thing. So this might be the solution to head down for your business because you always want to have connectivity. And so by setting this up now, it gets you through the next whatever four to six weeks and then you've got it as a backup. And they have a long list on Synology's website about all the various devices that can be used for this and there are some, you know, purpose-built devices but most of the things on the list, believe it or not, are Android and iPhones because you can connect them via USB and they do this perfectly as long again as you have service that allows it, allows internet sharing. So that's the way I would go with it. Any thoughts on that, John? If you're with Verizon, this is a consideration. So I use my phone as a hotspot and they have a feature called safety mode. Okay. Or if you exhaust your data, your LTE data, they'll throttle you to 3G until your next billing period or you could just buy, do a one time buy as much data as you need. Right. So that could get pricey. Yeah, that makes sense. How much they sell data for. Yeah. What do you have? Do you have like a 15 gig a month limit on your unlimited plan or whatever of hotspot data? That's generally how those go. I do not have unlimited. Right. That's right. That's right, of course. So the plan that I got with this, so I had a two gig plan and that was, you know, for being, going around town, that was plenty. And then they're like, Hey, you know, for five bucks more, we'll give you five gigs. And now they have the rewards program where you can add a gig of data every month. So right now, and they do roll over. So I'm up to, I think like nine. Got it. Which for me is plenty. That's great. That's good. That's good. Maybe not if you're gonna be running your business totally on the hotspot. Yeah. Well, it depends on what he needs. If it's just for, you know, like credit card transactions and those sorts of things that might be enough, but you're right. It depends on what he's got to do with it. So hopefully that helps, Scott. Anand asks, he says, I have been enviously been listening to many an episode where you've given listeners advice on networking in new homes or refurbs they're doing. I am now in the same boat. The house I've bought is an old Victorian three-story property around 3,000 square feet. I want to run some sort of wired backhaul, especially for areas where there is multimedia. But then for the rest, it's mesh wifi that I am super excited to get my hands on. I have no current wifi setup to speak of. Therefore I'm feeling that I am starting from scratch on the wifi. Great. Other relevant tech is that I run a Synology NAS for files and access, et cetera. My main question is which solution are you most impressed with and which is most manageable for people like me who are not into super granular configuration but want to tweak and set up a good config. I want to set up home security tech, lighting, automation, locks, multimedia sharing, et cetera. What do you suggest? Okay, so there's two ways to go with this. The TLDR easy advice is that ERO works. It really does. It's, they're reliable, they're priced very fairly, I think, and it just works. Yes, they also happen to be a sponsor of the show, but we like their stuff long before that happened. But you do, the sponsorship does allow that code. I think if you go to ERO.com slash MGG and I'm just pulling this off my head, you get free overnight shipping, which is great. So consider that. But ERO really is, that's the one that I sort of default to because I like the tech best and has nothing to do with the sponsorship. That said, there are others that I like. You're a Synology person. The Synology Mesh has gotten way more reliable these days. So that might be something worth considering here is checking out the Synology Mesh. The nice part about that is you're already used to the way Synology's web interface works because of your disk station. And so you get some of that. You can buy just the Synology Mesh units and use those as your router. Or you can buy, like I mentioned in the last question, like the RT2600AC, use that as your router and then add Synology's mesh points to it. Those come with a little more features than the ERO, quite frankly, they come with more features than any of the other consumer focused stuff. You can do cloud station or drive on it where you essentially run your own Dropbox. You can hang a drive off of it and point your time machine back upset it. It can share your printers on the network. The VPN engine in Synology's routers is the best VPN, like inbound VPN engine I've seen for that kind of thing. So that's another way to go. And then there's Plume. Plume is always right there at the top of the list with ERO and whomever else is at the top of the list. Synology has sort of floated there in recent months. But Plume's doing cool things. Again, their management is super easy and they've recently added this cool motion feature where it uses what it knows about the Plume access points connections with your other sort of fixed in place IoT devices. And it builds, let's say a map of your home. I don't want to use the word map that's probably wrong but it builds sort of a fundamental knowledge about your home. And as you or other humans move through your home you disrupt those wifi signals. And so it can know that there are people moving in your home because of those disruptions, which is pretty cool. And then you can say, well, don't worry about this if I'm home and you flag yourself as a user and you say, look, if my watch or my iPhone is in the house, I'm home. Don't worry about it. You can do that with other family members as well. But then it can also alert you and say like, hey, you know, there's motion in your home and none of the people that you've flagged as okay or home, that's kind of an interesting thing. So, you know, there's that. So that's my thing. Eero's the easy answer for you. I'd probably say maybe check out Synology too. But in a general sense, those are sort of the three that are floating to the top of my list. I mean, if you want to get geeky, you know, you unify stuff from ubiquity is awesome. It's a little more requires a little more active management, I will say, but it's fun if you're into that. Otherwise, you know, maybe not so much. So there you go. But John, before we have a little bit of time left, Eero just added home kit support. What does that mean? I think what it means. So if you go into the Eero app now, there's a button saying, hey, you want to add, you want to make home kit and home aware of your Eero's. And it's like, at first, when you ask me to do this, I'm like, well, you know, but I don't have any home kit devices. Well, as it turns out, I do. I just didn't know it yet. Okay, so first it brings you through a process where it's like, okay, I see this one. So it hands it over to the home app. And then it's like, okay, I see this one. What room is it in? So you're giving, so before my home environment wasn't set up because I wasn't using home kit, but now it is. And then if you go within the home app, you'll now see that it lists, okay, I'm sorry. So first I did that. Then when I ran the home app, it's like, hey, you got an Apple TV. You want to make that your hub? And it's like, oh yeah, okay, it is a home kit device. So once you're done with that whole operation now, what happens is that, so if I go into the home section of the home app, it has two categories listed here. Hubs and bridges. Oh, well, what's the hub and bridge? Oh, duh, it's my Apple TV. And then it has a listing of Wi-Fi network and routers. Isn't that neat? And it shows each one of them, but then here's the important part. So it's like, why would you want to do this? Is that there's a slider here that says home kit accessory security. Okay, now in my case, in my case though, I got to get more home kit devices because from my understanding is that this home kit security restricts what services and where your devices can go. And I don't think I have enough things yet in order to really take advantage of that or see that it's happening. Okay, that makes sense. All right, so yeah, as I was looking, because at the moment I'm running Euro for my Wi-Fi not, but I'm running it in bridge mode, which means I can't use home kit because it's not my router at the moment. But as I understand it, what you just said, they're granular, there's three options, right? A device can be restricted to only communicate within the home, which means it's only talking to your Apple devices when you're at home. But that can mean that the device is talking to your Apple TV, which is your home kit hub. And then that can talk out to the internet. And so you can control things from your phone when you're not at home because your Apple TV is doing that. But from a security standpoint, it keeps those IoT devices in your home from talking out of the home and that's good. Number two is what they call automatic where the router allows your IoT accessories to connect only to an automatically updated list that the manufacturer and Euro, I guess, kind of agree upon. So that's good. So if your device gets hacked, it keeps it from becoming a bot or something. And then, of course, there's no restriction. Your device can do what it was able to do yesterday. So that's pretty good. To me, that's handy. I like that. That's good. Cool. Yeah, and the other thing in the list here is... So now I have just a single icon, which is just for the Apple TV. Sure. Oh, I'm sorry. No, in the home section. So here's the other thing. In the home section now, it's aware of the fact that I now have speakers and TVs and it's like, hey, what level of access do you want to give to this? And there's everyone, anyone on the same network and only people sharing this home. So if I wanted to, I could prevent or allow you or whoever visits here that becomes part of my home setup, which you're not part of my home yet. Right, no, that's right. No, but that's not related to the Euro thing. What you're seeing there with your speakers is part of HomeKit and AirPlay 2. Yeah, exactly. That's awesome, cool. Well, thanks for taking us through that. That's good. That is all we have. We are recording this early. We're recording this on Friday the 13th. Largely because that was our schedule because I was going to travel to South by Southwest on the 14th to Austin for South by Southwest. That's not happening, needless to say. But we did just hear in the chat room, I think it was Brian Monroe and several of the people who are talking about it, that WWDC is happening virtually in an online format this year. So we'll put a link to that. But by the time you hear this episode, you probably already heard that. But if you haven't, then there you go. And there's a link in there. So WWDC 2020 will be online in June. So there you go. Thanks to everybody in the chat room at live.macgeekab.com for sharing that and for helping out with everything in the show. And thanks, yeah, Brian Monroe and Mac Vader and Dave Ginsburg and who else has been talking here in the chat room and iChart Radio. Cool, so thanks everybody. And thanks to all of you who were here on kind of a weird day, an off-cycle day. It's not a weird day, at least not yet. Feels normal so far, but we get our weekend, John. So that's cool, which is nice, nice little bonus. Yeah, there's nowhere to go. They shut everything off in my town. I know, I know. They shut everything off here too. Well, hopefully we can kind of keep this thing contained and it'll feel like we overreacted and maybe we did, maybe we didn't and maybe that's not so bad. So I don't know, it's hard to know. It was crazy yesterday. It was like end times at the supermarket and that they were out of the usual things when people start panicking. You know, almost all the bread was gone. Toilet paper, it's like, why are people buying all the toilet paper? I will tell you this, you know, I hesitated. I said there's some cool stuff found that I wanted to add in but I didn't really want to detour us. But since we're here, I stopped using toilet paper six years ago and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Now, before you start thinking weird thoughts. Right, there you go. I installed these like $30 bidet attachments to all our toilet seats in the house. It's so much better. I don't want to get, you know, gross about this but I will say a thing. If I pick up poop with my hand, I don't just wipe it off with a dry piece of paper and go on with my day. That's all I'm gonna say. And so the bidet allows me to sort of embody that concept, if you will. It's very good. It's very good. I like it. It's like 30 bucks. It took like 20 minutes to install each of them. I'll find, the ones that I bought six years ago don't exist anymore because these are sort of, you know, commodity items. But they've lasted and I haven't needed to buy new ones but I'll find something similar and I'll put it in the show notes for anybody and I'm sorry that we got here but maybe it's helpful to everyone. So, you know, that's what we do. We try to learn new things. Certainly you could get, I think they have like crazy ones that are like 250 bucks with the dryer and the heater and all that stuff. I don't have those, but you know, there you go. It ain't work. It's great. I always joke, but it's not a joke that they are the thing that I miss most second only to missing my family when I travel. So there you go. It is TMI. It's time to move on. Thank you for that. Ah, yeah. Okay, thank you so much for listening. Thanks to all of our sponsors for the episode, of course, Barebones.com, Jamf.com slash MGG, Linno.com slash MGG and LegalZoom.com. So thanks to all of them. Thanks to all of you. Thanks to all of our premium listeners. We will go through that list next week. We've got running late today and had a lot of stuff to go through so I kind of reprioritized and jiggered. But thanks to all of you for allowing us to be able to do this. Thanks for all of your questions. Thanks for all of your tips. And that's what I have. That's what I got, John. What else do you have? Anything? No, there's stuff on the way. Okay. I'm getting a delivery today. I wonder what it is. Oh, maybe that one thing or the other thing. Oh, yeah, it could be. Or all the other stuff. I don't know, I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Oh, I don't know, John. It's all the craziness. It's all the craziness. Yeah, all right. Well, we will we will see you next week. It's what we're going to do because we podcast and it's it's what we get to do from here. So it's cool. Thank goodness. I don't know what else I would do. I don't know. It's good. Are you sure you can't think of anything? Yeah, actually, I can think of one thing. And, you know, I can think of when we were at Mac Tech and we all shared a moment in the same room together. And I really hope that we all get to get together again if it's not this year. But, you know, like we got to prioritize getting back to a point where we are actually having human human contact because it's really good. So I will share this particular moment from Mac Tech, which not Mac Tech. Why did I say Mac Tech? Mac Stock, when we got to do this in person, hopefully we get to do it again some day because not only was it a beautiful little moment, but it's some fantastic advice that all of the folks that attended in person at Mac Stock got to share. And we will share it again here.