 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek app, episode six, five, four for Sunday, April 23rd, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek app, the show where you send in. What is it? Yes, your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. The goal, of course, being that we all learn at least four new things every single time that we get together sponsors for this episode include BombFell, B-O-M-B-F-E-L-L, we're at BombFell.com slash M-G-G, you get 25 bucks off of this awesome personal styling service. And that's all I'm going to say. I'll tell you, well, it's not all I'm going to say, it's all I'm going to say right now. You have to listen because we'll talk more about that later. Harry's, we're at Harry's.com slash M-G-G, you get a free trial of their awesome razors. We'll talk about that. And Bitbucket, we're at bitbucket.org slash for the code, you get a free Bitbucket account and a free Bitbucket repository. So you got to check that out. We'll talk more about all of that later in the episode here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. Here, fearful Connecticut, John F. Brun. Good morning. And being that today is Sunday, April 23rd, happy birthday, my friend. I got that right, correct? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's also Shakespeare's birthday. Well, hey, you know, that's right. That's right. I mean, there's somebody has to be number two and, and old Bill, he's perfect for that, right? I mean, in terms of most important birthdays on, on April 23rd, right? I mean, having Bill Shakespeare is your number two. That's not so bad. Yeah. Yeah. You did some good stuff. Yeah. You know. Yep. So folks, we are actually recording this one day early. So I'm wishing John a happy birthday in, in advance, had some scheduling things. So, but still it's coming out on the, the 23rd. Let's, let's just dive right in, shall we, John? And, and, and get, get right to this because we have a lot to go through. So Bill starts us off with a quick tip. Bill says, I'm catching up on my podcast and I just listened to Mac Geekab 651 and want to come. Oh, oh, wait, I promised myself I wasn't going to do this. He says, there was a, there was, he just had a comment. His quick tip is I noticed that when I now take a picture within the messages app on my iPhone, it no longer saves that photo to my camera roll on the photos app. This is different. And this behavior started with iOS 10 and he's right. It doesn't save it to your camera roll. You can choose to save it to your camera roll, but pictures taken inside of the messages app with that little portal viewer camera thing that exists there only live within the messages app, but though you can, you can tap them and choose to save them. So there you go. You know, right? Good stuff. I know. I like it. Also, a last minute quick tip addition from our chat room here at macgeekab.com slash stream, Alex reminded us all about how much he loves and that we have multiple undos in the Finder and this has been there a while, but it's one of those things that if you know about it, you probably take it for granted and you just don't think about the fact that you can continue undoing most things back in the chain. And if you don't know about it, really handy. Move a file, rename a file, delete a file, as long as you have an empty the trash that's tougher to undo the command Z, right back up the chain. It's good stuff. Right, John? Yeah. I didn't know that. I know. You've probably done it. Well, I rarely make mistakes. You've probably done it. Oh, right. Of course. Right. That's what I don't need to undo. But yeah, sometimes you fumble finger something and you're like, oh, no. I assume with the wisdom that comes with your advanced stage, my friend, you would never make a mistake. Right. Right. Okay. And so I guess I can call you my old friend and I mean that in all the ways. So there you go. Joe has a cool stuff found for us. He says it's duplicati. He says you all I think will love this. It's open source backup software with encryption and compression, but lots of Mac geek hub centric features, powerful yet free and open source duplicati dupli cati.com. And Joe wrote us this huge summary about it, but to encapsulate this, it encrypts as it backs up as it has its own restore engine. So storage options for the backup can be much more flexible, easy options to link directly to cloud storage vendors or to your own remote servers. It has a command line interface options for Windows Mac or Linux or an easy GUI. So scripting it would be very easy if you want to use command line stuff. He says the current version, version 2.0 now uses block storage process, which is user adjustable, very cool, so that you don't have to back up entire large files. It just chunks them up into blocks and an easy option to exclude include folders, file types, hidden systems, all that stuff, very granular options, has its own scheduler. And he says, did I mention duplicati is free. So very, very cool stuff. Thanks for sharing that with us, Joe. So there you go. Free backup software and then you have to pick your own backup destination. But again, you may have that with your own devices kind of spread around or you can, you know, go get storage. So duplicati, very, very cool. Thanks for thanks for sharing that with us. I had never heard of it. Had you heard of duplicati before, John? No, no. See, we learned. There it is. We learned something new. I like it, man. It's good. It's good. I have a cool stuff found that I that I want to share. It's called the or they are it's headphones. I can't speak today. That's bad. I blame Barry Fulk. I had a theater show last night and then Barry came in and hung out afterwards. So I was out later than I normally would have been. But plan Tronix backbeat pro two headphones. These are wireless Bluetooth headphones can also be wired. They have they're they're over the ear headphones, which I don't like the on the ear ones quite so much. I like them either in the ear or over the ear, but not on my ear. If that makes sense. Hopefully those distinctions are self-evident. These backbeat pro twos, they sound stellar. They they're very lightweight. The active noise canceling in them is so good that when I brought them back to the house to have everybody else test them and see how they fit, my wife's ears, she's very particular about the types of things that she will put on her ears or inner ears. And so she's always my litmus test for the comfort level of headphones. After I've decided, yeah, they sound good enough. Maybe I'll talk about them on the show. I want to do all this. Well, here's what happened. She left for China yesterday morning with my son on this school trip that that I mentioned about a month ago, and the headphones left with her. So, you know, I think that's pretty much a testament to their comfort and use. She texted me actually from the airplane last night that she loved the way these things sounded and killed all the ambient noise and all of that stuff, really, really cool stuff, 200 bucks for for these things. So I wanted to mention them, Backbeat Pro 2 headphones from Plantronics. I highly recommend them. You can get them at Amazon or whatever. We'll put a link in the show notes because that's what we do. Yeah, John, good questions. Keep on trucking. I'll look at this. Yeah. Every fan of Bluetooth ear things, though. Well, I mean, right. So Bluetooth headphones are going to have whatever sound limitations Bluetooth imposes when you're connected Bluetooth. But but you can also plug these things in directly if you if you so choose. But but they sound good. I mean, and they sound good on Bluetooth as well. You know, the sound quality is actually quite quite good. And I'm kind of picky about that stuff. So yeah, it's good stuff. So yesterday, while I was trying to get the show prepped for for us and for you, I was getting as often happens. This is not a complaint. It's just an observation. I get text messages from friends to, you know, and family members to help solve their technical issues because it's what it's what I do. And people know that that's what I do. And and there were so many of them going on yesterday that I figured I'd include some in the show because it was impeding me from prepping the show. And I realized it's not impeding me at all. I'm prepping the show. Here we go. So one thing I want to point out is if you are using a especially a third party calendar like Busy Cal or something like that, you may not know that you need to change your your iCloud credentials. If you've reset your password or something, Busy Cal may or may not be able to log back in. And it may not tell you that it's not logging in. In fact, I had a friend yesterday was saying, Hey, didn't we have something scheduled? And I said, Yeah, and I looked on all of my calendars. And sure enough, it was synced to everything. So I'm like, OK, it's, you know, it's in iCloud. It's syncing. It said, is your iCloud not syncing? He's like, No, of course, it's syncing. Fine. It's well, can you check? And I said, just, you know what? Go type in the username and password again into busy because he says, I use Busy Cal on my Mac. And then he said, Well, wait, it's appearing on my iPhone. Like, OK, so iCloud is working. It's just you have one client that's not connecting. And sure enough, he went in and entered his credentials again into Busy Cal. And, you know, and then he said, as soon as he entered him, he said it's still not here. And then he said, Nevermind. Wait, there it is. Because, of course, it takes a minute to sync everything and pull it all down. So just a reminder, Busy Cal makes it pretty easy. If you look for it to see that there's a problem, you look next to whatever the calendar provider is, like Google or iCloud or whatever you have in their exchange. And it would have a little triangle saying I'm having some sort of problem. So anyway, that's there you go. But that's one of my tips, John. Any thoughts on that before we move on? We're moving here. I like it. Well, I ran into that earlier with messages when I changed my iCloud password. I think, yeah, I was expecting to get a handoff message on my Mac and I'm like, why is it not sending it here? And then I looked and I was logged out of messages because I changed my password. Yeah. Yeah, it's not. It doesn't remind you the way you would expect it to. That's right. And with all of these changes that we've been making, either enabling two factor and, of course, if you or just changing your iCloud password, but if you enable two factor, then you have to for third party apps like Busy Cal, you have to go into iCloud on the web and create what's called a one time use or an application specific password. I guess application specific is what they call it. And then that's what you plug in inside of. Busy Cal, not your normal password. And that's because it's not a limitation of Busy Cal. It's a limitation of iCloud. Apple does not provide a way for third party apps to do two factor authentication for iCloud. So that's actually a security hole that Apple still creates. You know, if you add a Google calendar to Busy Cal, then it you do get that full two factor experience to log in using, you know, essentially OAuth, but Apple does not provide that for third parties. I have no idea why, but that's just. I know that's Apple's thing, right? There you go. Talk how it works. All right. And then another question was a friend was asking me how he said, look, my computer hasn't slept in days. And I said, well, that's not good. We all need our sleep. He says, yeah, I get to my desk every morning and the computer's awake. And so I offered him a couple of suggestions. The first is restart your Mac. It there is some process running on your computer that has decided to keep your Mac awake. And sometimes a restart will just solve that. And then you don't have to worry about it. But if a restart doesn't, or if it comes back, there is a command line incantation that you can type. But it's very, very simple. It's PM set space dash G. That's Papa, Mary, Sierra, Echo, Tango, PM set. And then dash G, dash George. And what that will do is you'll see an output that lists all kinds of things about the power management and the settings for the power management on your Mac. One of them will be named sleep. And you might see. So next to sleep, you'll see a number. That's the number of minutes that your Mac will wait before going to sleep. That's fine. What you want to do is look to see if there's something in parentheses after that that says sleep prevented by. And then that's going to list processes. Right now on my Mac, I think I have eight core audio D processes impeding sleep. And that's just because of all the various things that I have to do the podcast audio in to me, you know, from me, audio out to you, John, audio out to the stream, et cetera, et cetera. So it's all of those. But and yeah, people in the chat room are posting that core audio D is preventing sleep for them. And that's because they're streaming the audio from this chat. So your your computer knows, oh, yeah, if I'm doing something where I'm playing audio or recording audio, I shouldn't go to sleep. So that can give you a hint as to what's going on. Any thoughts on that, John? Hmm. Do I also seem to recall? No, I think because they they changed the console, but I seem to recall it. People in the console, that also gives a at one point that also gave a reason. Yeah, the console is different now, you know. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't make me happy. But it's actually kind of cool. I gave us a talk on the about the console to the folks at Mac Tech Pro earlier this month, right? Earlier this month, I think so. Yeah. And to do that talk, I had to learn a little bit more about the new console. It's it's quite a bit different than the Sierra console or than the El Capitan console, but it's not. It's not awful. I'll prep some of that stuff and we can we can we'll add that as a topic for a future show because I want to I want to wrap my head around it again before I talk to you folks about it. But it's not so bad. But yeah, here it is. If you search, yes, the thing is that you'll also see in the console, they may have to again, go through some generations now to find this. But you'll see a message from the colonel giving a reason that the computer woke. Now, you see are you seeing this in Sierra or in in El Capitan, because I know you you still run one of each, right? No, no, I'm I'm I'm on the latest. Oh, you're full I'm I'm just doing a yeah, I'm just doing a Google on yeah, I just did a Google on a console wake reason got it. And you will see. Yeah, but I think you have to use what's that utility? They have a utility now that'll tear through the console and yes. And I can that's one of the things I want to remember. Oh, why can't I think of it? It's like logarithmic or something, but it's that's not it. It's yeah. Anyway, we'll we aren't we aren't going to come up with it right away, but we will come up with it. I promise we'll tell you before the end of the show, perhaps even. But yeah, there's a tool that you can use to do better things in the console. So cool. All right, consolation consolation. I told you, it's like logarithmic. See it right here. Yeah, I think you could use that to tear through your console. And yeah, and search for wake and you'll see a secret code that tells you why your computer woke up or didn't sleep. Right, right, right. Yep, consolation. We'll put a I'll put a link in the show notes now that we have. Now that we have the the name and all of that good stuff. All right, we do have a I believe a geek challenge. And look, unless you have the magic answer, Mr. Braun, and then, of course, if you do, that's even better. But Sushil writes, he says, I believe it was one of your podcasts where you turned me on to an app called Desk Connect, if not my apologies. No, it was us. He says, it was a nice app that allowed you to drop something from your Mac to your iPhone through a desktop app and vice versa. I just learned that the service was discontinued last month, a real bummer. I was wondering if you were aware of any apps that may be similar and act as a replacement. Cloud systems are not quite as user friendly as this app was. I'm looking forward to any comments and Sushil is correct. Unfortunately, Desk Connect was what I'll call collateral damage in Apple's acquisition, aqua hire of the entire team there. That's the team that makes workflow. And when Apple acquired workflow, they acquired the entire company and Desk Connect got shut down. The Desk Connect folks on their website say they suggest AirDrop, Handoff and Universal Clipboard. But you know, they're Apple employees now. I don't they could not recommend anything third party. It would be surprising if they did, right? And I'm sure this was just part of the deal with the acquisition. So I don't know of anything else that does what Desk Connect used to do. I mean, AirDrop is supposed to. But it's never quite exactly what you want. So I don't know of anything. Do you, John? Again, I broke out the Google Foo and let's see, Dropler, DROPLR is one suggestion and files. I haven't tried either one of them. So I'll have to give those a whirl. All right. I'll put them I'll put them there. That's pretty good. And what was the other one you said? Let's see, end files. How what's the URL for that? Let's see. Andy in the chat room says push bullet. I forgot about push bullet. Yeah, that might be the magic answer to this solution here. I forgot all about push bullet. That's why we do this the way we do it. Thank you so much, Andy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so we'll put that one there. What was the what was this other one? End file and F I L E. And files and files and F I L E S. Yeah, I'll all right. You'll you'll you'll add it to the show notes. There you go. Perfect. All right. Good stuff. Yeah, so that's right. I forgot about push bullet. I never heard about Dropler before and I never heard about end files. Cool stuff. I like it. All right, John. Actually, you know what I want to do? I want to talk about our sponsors. I'm pretty excited about about these folks here. Does that does that work for you, my friend? The just this one. OK, all right. Three sponsors for you today. The first two for you. And then the last one is for your business. So we'll start with bomb fell B O M B F E L L dot com slash M G G is where you go to experience this. It's a fantastic. It's a personal styling service for men. Now, you're going to say, Dave, what does that mean? What that means is you get a personal dedicated stylist that helps you pick out clothes that work for you. And then they ship you these clothes. You have a week to try them on, see if you like them. And if you like any of the items that they send, you keep them and pay for those and the ones you don't like, you send back and it's free shipping in both directions. Of course, right? That's how this thing works. And it's fully personalized. Like I have a dedicated stylist. His name is Will. 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Very important. And it's a question from Dennis. All right, take us to Dennis, man. And first, he says, hi. Oh, and he's now a premium member again. That's good. Though he seems to have sent us to Feedback at MackieCab.com, Dave. Wait, he sent it to, he's a premium listener and he sent it to Feedback at MackieCab.com? Yes, he sent it to Feedback at MackieCab.com. Huh, well, as a premium listener, he should have sent that to Premium at MackieCab.com. Yes, he should have. Yeah. But there's the question. I would like to set up my notifications on my iPhone, iPad and iMac to just display email messages from my VIPs. And I've looked into all the obvious areas and I'm unable to find this option. I use the basic mail app created by Apple, given though it is very frustrating. I have been to all the system preferences in both notification center and the mail app. I can't imagine this can't be done. Can you help? Yes, I can help. So it's kind of buried, but I dug them up and here we go. On iOS, you want to go to settings, notifications. Mail, and you'll see a VIP choice. Mac OS, it's a little different in that you go into mail preferences, general new message notifications. And there's a VIP choice. So I have a follow up question, Mr. Braun, because I do know what it's going to be. And I can't, I can, I think I know the answer to my follow up question. But I do this on iOS and on my Mac. And it is if you get a lot of email coming in, only getting notifications from VIPs is a great way to sort of, you know, separate the little bit of the noise. So I have like you as a VIP, John. And I have, you know, my family is VIPs and various other people. And then that way I only see notifications about email on my phone from that. But I obsessively check my email anyway. So I don't miss email from other people. These just happen to kind of float to top of mind if I happen to, excuse me, if I happen to look at my notifications. But the question that I have, John, how do I add you to my VIP list? Once I've said to my phone, only notify me for VIPs. I thought it was in contacts. I can't find it. So the way the way I always do it is I do it from within mail. And I just tap on I go into a message and on iOS, I tap on the person's name. And then right there at the top, you get an option to say, well, it's not at the top. It's at the top of the list of options. But you get an option that says add to VIP. And and you can do the same thing on the Mac, too. Just, you know, click on the little drop down next to the person's name. And you can also remove them from VIPs in that in that same way. So yeah, I thought you could do it in contacts, but it doesn't look like you can. It looks like you have to do it within mail. Yeah, I think you're right about that. Can I? Yeah, can't do it in contacts. Right. No, it's it's just a mail thing. So there you go. But it but it does sync with contacts because if you add someone as a VIP on one device, it that and you'd sync via iCloud, it propagates to all of your devices. So there you go. Good stuff, man. I like it. That's, you know, that's that's kind of to me, that falls into the quick tip category because it's that type of thing that once you start doing it, it it fundamentally changes what you do. But you stop thinking about the fact that it's doable. It like that's not if somebody said one of the 10 things you do on your Mac that you couldn't live without. And if you had to set up again from scratch, you would do immediately. This is totally one of those, but I wouldn't think about it because it's just automatic now. So that I love it when this kind of stuff comes up. So thank you, Dennis. Thanks, John. You want to take us to Andrew? Yeah, Andrew's got a good little cookie here, I think. And he says, as a checklist item, I regularly export keychains out of keychain access and can then import them into a new computer via keychain access. So I don't lose that data. It's a good idea. I imagine over time it may become unruly. However, I can always store them in a safe place in the event that I may need to unlock or decrypt something down the line. I've been doing this for a while now for exactly the reasons you mentioned. This is an area often overlooked when backups are being considered and you will not have any of the keychains unless you do a complete clone of your hard drive, as it's not an area you would think to back up. In fact, I have no idea where the data to the keychains are stored. Oh, yeah, that's a good question. And I looked into this once and as far as I can tell, Dave, there are not one, not two, but three places where keychain data is stored. Really? And they are. Yeah, check it out. So the first is your home directory. Yeah, slash library slash keychains. Totally. Yeah. The second place is slash library slash keychains. OK, so just hard drive library keychains. Top level. Yeah. And then the third that I found and then at least on one of my systems, there was data in all of them. And the third one is slash system slash library slash keychains. OK, so I'm with you on the first two and on the next one I need to look because generally things in system library are provided by the OS and would not need would would never change. So as long as you get to the the same OS, you would have those same keychains. And I think that's actually true. I'm looking at mine here and I think they are static, not user modifiable, right? Yeah, so I'm but I didn't answer the question. Yeah. Where is the keychain data? No, no, no, I'm I told you're right. Yes, if you want to know where the data for all your keychains is, that's totally where it is in terms of backing it up. I don't think you'd need to back up the system library one. And I'm looking in the library one to see if I would recommend backing it up. I don't know that you need. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I would back that up the system keychain. That's where your so so the one that's in library keychains, not system library keychains, but library keychains, I either one not in your home directory. That one contains your airport logins and that kind of stuff if they're stored on your Mac. So yeah, I would I would back that one up for sure. That that gets user data that I would call user data. Yeah. And clearly, those get backed up if you do a clone like with carbon copy cloner, but I also verified the time machine does also because the time machine doesn't back up all data. No. I know there's a list somewhere. I don't know where it is off top of my head, but there's a list of things it doesn't back up. And it's typically stuff that you don't really need to back up like caches and stuff like that. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. So can't hurt to, you know, put those somewhere else. As we've discussed in the past, it's always good to make not one, not two, but probably three backups. Yeah. Of anything in case it gets destroyed. Yep. Especially key chains. Key chains are pretty important. I think so. Yeah. For sure. All right. We got another one here, Dave. All right. I think we're done with that. Yeah. So we have a question from Daniel. Daniel says, I'm ready to ask if you think a Netgear JGS 524NA 24 port gigabit ethernet switch purchased in August of 2014 is too old for a modern network. Is the software firmware hardware updated in any way? My humble opinion is it looks like it's a fine. Yeah, it's switch. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, 2014 is is fairly new. I mean, it's a supported model. You know, so I search for it. I see it on Netgear's site. The only comment I would have, so this is a gigabit unmanaged or I don't know if I'd say dumb, but not smart switch. Right. So all you're going to get out of an unmanaged switch is I mean, it's certainly going to get the data moving around at gigabit speeds, but you're not really going to get anything beyond that. So since you have it already, I mean, yeah, it'll it should do what's advertised. It'll move your data around gigabit speeds. But you know, if I had to purchase one, Dave, for a little extra coin, I think it's probably one of their least expensive twenty four port switches. If I was going to get a switch, a gigabit switch. And actually, I think these days now, 10 gigabit is coming into fashion. But for most people, I think gigabit, you know, do the trick. Yeah. Um. You may want to consider something called a managed switch. Well, there's a there's a few names for it, Dave. Some call it managed. And some call it smart. And actually, this is what I did when, you know, when I had to buy an a port switch, I actually got a T.P. T.P. Link. Where the heck is it? What model was it here? The you'll put it in the show notes. It's a it's a 16 port or an eight port. That's an eight port. OK. TLSG108E and it's smart. And then you can do a lot of things with it. So one, a lot of things smart switches will do is let you see what's happening on the network in greater detail. So like this one will show, you know, the amount of data going in, going out, errors, stuff like that. You can. So yeah. So I'm I'm curious here because you you are always the proponent of smart switches and and I've always been sort of dismissive of that to be perfectly. Frank, why would I need like I have switches everywhere in my house? It having a smart one. What what good is that going to do me? So birthday boy, I ask, what is the benefit? Like what what do you actually like? What's the use case where you say, thank goodness, I have a smart switch and here's why you should have one. Is it just to be geeky or does it actually help? Well, I think it also. So this one, so number one, it can give you, it can report. You know, what's happening on each each each port on the switch. So you could identify. So for example, it has like a cable test. So it can say. So one thing you could see, for example, is errors, you know, transmission errors. OK. That could help you identify a failing or bad cable. Like, you know, when you had, you know, you had your cat or something. No, I'm right. No, this is why I'm asking this question. Right. Exactly. So if you had a smart switch, or at least this brand, it would say, hey, you know, there's something with your cable. So it does like an electrical test or also you could see that there were, you know, errors at some point. Yeah. Now, will it send you an alert? Like, is there can I get like an iOS app that says, dude, problem switched, go, right? Like, because that sounds because it's a it's generally not an insignificant amount of money to go up to a smart switch. Right. I mean, it's you're paying an extra 30 to 50 percent generally. Well, you know, this one I got, I think it's like 40 bucks for an eight port. OK. Yeah. OK. Yeah. So not terribly expensive. No, I guess not. This one, this particular one does not proactively send alerts, though the, you know, I'm sure other brands would. Or if I search that they probably do have one. OK. The other thing is that this one had a proprietary version. One of this had a proprietary Java app. You had to run. Yeah. Right. I remember you talking about that. Yeah. The newer ones now are web based. OK. Another thing is that it can do port aggregation. So, for example, I can do that with non with non managed switches, too, though. I have many of them that do that. Yeah. OK. Yeah. So most will do that automatically. This one, you know, I had to say, OK, I'm going to respond these two ports and make them look like one. And then my Synology, I said, OK, you know, I plugged it in and it's like, OK, right. Huh. I mean, can you do like, can you do some like prioritization of ports? Like, does your. Oh, that's another one. Yeah. So there's so it has some rudimentary QoS as well or quality of service. Yeah. So you could you could. Yeah, you can define quality of service and say, OK, you know, this, you know, prioritize this traffic over that traffic. Yeah. Yeah, I don't have this. I don't have the software up in front of me here. But yeah, but I mean, that's the generally the type of stuff. OK, because I yeah, I mean, I see it. And also because I run all kinds of Sonos stuff in my house and Sonos absolutely relies on what's something called spanning tree protocol, STP, because it builds a wireless and wired mesh. And so STP is this thing that looks at all the paths two devices have to get to each other. Because when you have both wired and wireless, you might have the ability for two devices to talk over parallel paths. And STP helps to decide which one should be the path that sends data so you don't create a loop. And I've had it where a switch will block the STP packets, but doesn't block anything else. And then, of course, you run into a problem because now it's creating a loop because things don't know. And and so I know that some managed switches allow you to set those specific options and say, no, turn on STP. This is a good thing. So yeah, interesting. All right. All right. You might have me sold on this, John. The next time I have to buy a switch, I might I might go managed. Yeah, because I, you know, I'm looking on Amazon here. You can get, you know, a Netgear six. I'm looking at 16 port switches because that's generally kind of where I need to buy something for the locations that I have switches. But, you know, you can get a Netgear one for 110 bucks, managed 16 port, Zeisel for 70 bucks. Actually, there's a Netgear. I don't know if this one is managed or not, but there's a Netgear one for 70 and it says it's managed. But so OK, so somewhere it's not it's not terribly expensive, but it's not the 50 bucks that I paid for my my current switch. But that's OK, you know, it's yeah. And I have kind of a hybrid set up in that the other thing that this did for me when I was having problems with my transporter and it was it was blasting my network with with traffic. Yeah, yeah. My dumb switch got overwhelmed. You remember, we have broadcasts where all of a sudden I died. You know, I went away because my network got saturated with traffic from this. I suspect it was from the transporter. Or at least I thought it was because when I, you know, unplugged it and plugged it back in, the problem went away. Right. But also a lot of these smarter switches will do is prevent that sort of thing and that they'll identify a misbehaving device and say, all right, I'm cutting you off, man. Huh. Because I never had that problem once I got this smart switch and that it was able to detect that this thing was misbehaving and isolated. Huh. All right, I'm in. Yeah, all right. That's cool. So. So, but, but like, but I have the smart switch and then actually what I have plugged into it because I ran out of ports is I actually have the dumb basic switch shut into that to give me some more ports. Yeah, I'm in. I yeah. And I mean, even if you want to go like I have my I guess it's a what is it a TP link switch that I have that I use now? I forget. I got to look. But, you know, I think that one cost me 60 bucks. It wasn't 50 and so for 10 bucks more, it's really not that much. Oh, I have trend net that those are the ones I'm running. I have these these trend net 16 port switches that actually have been working great, but they're they're dumb switches. So, all right, next time I have to buy a switch, I'm going to get a managed switch and I'm going to dip my toe into these waters, my friend. I want to I want to talk about VPNs because we have a lot of questions from you about VPNs and we have a lot to say about VPN. Some of those questions come from premium listeners and some come from regular listeners and that's all fine. But I do want to take a minute as we have started doing to thank the premium listeners that contributed this week. And and so I will start with those in the biannual twenty five dollar every six month group. That is Steve are. Thank you, Laura S. Thank you, Scott C. Thomas S. Dennis F. Ward J. Deborah F. Thank you to all of you, you rock. And then four of you in the monthly ten dollar a month category, John V. Stephen A. Ken L. And Nick S. Thank you very, very much. I do have a question for all of you. I the way I've been doing this is we've obviously been saying first name, last initial. I do that to, you know, protect people's privacy. Do you care? Should I say would you like me to say your full name? I guess that's really the thing because this is about you. So let us know. And of course, you can email us premium at mckykeb.com. So let us know if you would like us to say your full name or if you would prefer to remain mildly anonymous. So there you go. Thank you to all of you. If you want to learn about Mackie Cab Premium, you can visit us on the web, mckykeb.com. There's a big link right there. If you want to go even one step further, mckykeb.com, premium will bring you right there, then you can learn all about it. It is not mandatory, as you know, it's only if you care. That's the wrong word. It's only I was going to say only if you care to support us directly. Only if you wish to support us directly. I know you care about us. We care about you. We love you. So care was the wrong word to use. It's only if you wish to support us directly. There you go. Because I know we have care in all directions here. It didn't didn't mean to imply otherwise. OK, so let's talk about VPNs. And we might as well just start with Robert. I'm not I'm not exactly sure of the right order to do this. But Robert says you were recommended as an excellent source of information. I am looking for a top rated VPN service for my home business to become invisible and undetectable when online. Any thoughts? So, yeah, there are a few options. There's there's commercial VPNs. Many have been recommended. The one that keeps that I have yet I have yet to test, but keeps being recommended is one called Astral, A-S-T-R-I-L-L that the lots of people seem to really like. But I also like Pro XPN quite a bit. In fact, I also like TunnelBear. I also like Cloak. John, do we have do you have any other favorites that I neglected to mention? Well, there's my home. Well, I'm going to get there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. No, I'm just talking about commercial services. Yeah, exactly. Out of those, yeah, I'm a. Yeah, I think I'm a TunnelBear fan. OK, yeah, I'm just because they're cross-platform. So it's both on iOS, right? All of the ones I mentioned are cross-platform, for sure. And I mean, iOS, Mac, Windows, you know, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. You can. So those are all what I would call cloud VPN services where, you know, you're connecting to someone else's service. And obviously, you know, you pay them for that. Actually, some of them have either free trials. TunnelBear has a free plan as does ProXPN. So those are great ones to get started with. Your bandwidth is somewhat limited, but it might be enough for you. So that it was certainly. But if you're doing it from your home business, you're probably going to want someone, something with unlimited bandwidth, and then you're going to want to pay a little bit for it. But it's not terrible. Here's the other thing you could do, though. Jeff Butts, who was on the show what two weeks ago, wrote up, he's killing it lately at TMO. It's awesome. He wrote up a piece about how to set up your own cloud hosted VPN service. And this is cool because that now you can use it from home or remote or whatever, but it's yours. And you can do it for free if you set it up on an instance at Amazon's EC2 servers. And the steps to set this up are very, very simple. It's it's a it's a VPN. Well, it's a configuration script that someone has named Algo and and they say that it's named after Al Gore, the father of the Internet. And so the little tongue in cheek. But but really, it's just sort of a very standard open source VPN package that's called strong Swan or something. But the Algo scripts make it very simple to configure this for either Amazon EC2 or Dreamhost or a few others. Now, Amazon EC2 is free for a year up to 15 gigs of data. So, you know, depending on what you're using it for, you may or may not that may not work for you. But you can also set up a Dreamhost virtual server for five bucks a month. And so now you've got a VPN for you and all of your family and friends, if you want, for five bucks a month. So this Algo thing is pretty cool. We'll put a link to that in the in the show notes. All right. So there's that. That's your own cloud based VPN. It took me like five minutes to set it up. Really no big deal. But if you really want to be anonymous, let's go one step past VPN, John. And let's talk again about Tor. So Tor is called the onion router. And it doesn't just route your traffic through a VPN where in theory, someone could trace it back to you. It routes it through no less than three hops and each hop doesn't know about the previous hop's connections. So once you get to the third one, the third hop has no idea who you are. It only knows about the second one. The second one only knows about the first one and the first one only knows about you, right? So this totally separates it. It slows down your connection somewhat. But if you want to be anonymous, this is the best way I know of to do it. It's not guaranteed. There are ways to figure things out by looking at like if you if you use Tor and you logged into TMO servers, right? Well, I could say, OK, I know that you've logged into our server and I know the IP address from this exit node that that you've connected through. Now, you know, if I was the NSA, which I as far as you're concerned, I'm not. You know, we could start looking at who's connecting into this Tor system, but you don't know where the entrance node is. So you'd have to have some idea of who to target and see. You just start correlating, OK, this person is connected over here. This person is logged into TMO over here. Very difficult to do. But if if I were the NSA and I'm not saying I am, then that's one way that that you could. But otherwise, it's really the best way to be anonymous. So how do you use Tor, right, John? That's the question. There are a couple. How do you store? There are some routers that have Tor support built in. And so you you run a Tor proxy on your router and then anything you route, you put anything you point at that proxy just automatically gets routed through Tor. The DD work open source firmware added a Tor proxy, I think, last year or maybe two years ago. So that's one option if you have a router that can run that firmware and you want to run it. Another option is a piece of software called Tales at tales.bound.org. Tales will let you it create. It is a virtual machine that you boot from a thumb drive. And and it has all of your stuff. But to connect to Tor, but nothing else. So there's no risk of, you know, you checking your email through this without realizing it and potentially exposing yourself. That sort of thing. So that's what Tales is for. If you just want to browse with Tor, there is Tor browser for the Mac and we'll put a link to that, too. And that only anonymizes your browsing activity inside the Tor browser, right? So so, you know, limited, but but relatively anonymous. And and that's for the Mac and other desktop platforms. Now, as far as iOS, Red Onion, there are several Tor browsers. I've tested a bunch of them. Red Onion is the one that I find works best for me. And it's fairly simple to use. So Red Onion is is the one I like. I'll put a link to that. And that's that's kind of like Tor, you know, it's just the browser. It's not anything beyond that. And we've mentioned this one before. But what if you want to connect your entire iOS experience via Tor? Now, that gets difficult, right, John, because you don't have the ability to control your entire network on iOS. You can't interfere with the network stack, except you can with a VPN. And so the folks that make Red Onion make a product called Black Mesh and Black Mesh is it sets itself up as a VPN and it connects you to Tor. And now all of your network activity goes across Tor, which is pretty smart and pretty cool. So and you can check all this stuff out. I think both I know Black Mesh is free. I think Red Onion is free, too. And then, you know, I think there's there's limits to what you can do with Black Mesh and and you can, you know, buy more or whatever. So. So that's that's how to be really anonymous. That's my thoughts. But, John, you want to take us to Chuck and talk about the VPN benefits that go beyond data security? Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah. Well, he asked the question, you but I answer it because I'm taking control here. That's what we do. Taking over over or move over or whatever. All right. But are we talking about Jimi Hendrix here? Could be. Didn't he say that in fire? I think he did. All right. So Chuck says, I've heard you talk about VPNs on a few podcasts and I've read about how you like to roll your own when it comes to setting up a VPN. I like the simpler approach and have tunnel bear free, but I'm testing out cloaks since it automatically turns on. Here is the real question, though. Do I really need a VPN? I go to coffee shops to work, but they all have encryption on their Wi-Fi in the FYI. If you're logging into Wi-Fi and they ask for a password, then in all likelihood, that is encrypted Wi-Fi connection. If you're just connecting to Wi-Fi without providing a password, then that's probably public Wi-Fi and people can see that. Right. And then he says, all my connections are HTTPS, which is a secure protocol and encryption. Right. Right. And other work related websites. So what would be in the clear, even if I did connect to an open Wi-Fi network, what am I risking with HTTPS almost everywhere? I know you need VPN to feel I must be missing some critical piece of the puzzle. And no, I think my response would be, yeah, if you're connected to Wi-Fi using a password, then that's encrypted, so you're cool there. And assuming all your clients, whatever software you're running uses SSL or TLS, which as far as he knows, they do, then that will be encrypted as well. Now, it could be that you're running an app that is poorly designed and is not using a secure connection. So that that could be a risk. Yeah. Or maybe doing some sneaky stuff behind your back that you don't know about and it's not encrypted. So, but if you're sure that all your apps are running HTTPS, then that's encrypted as well. So why does he why would he want to run a VPN then? Well, here's the thing. So you're protected in this case from people seeing your data. But there's another aspect to a VPN that some of them do and some of them don't. Like, for example, the one that I roll my own Dave, if I'm connecting to my Synology using VPN, then where I'm going can be seen by my ISP, right? I see. So the aspect that just to crystallize this, because I think you glossed over, you tease us about it, but you didn't get there is that with even with with Chuck's secure connections, people can't see the data, but they can see what he's talking to. They can see he's talking to his bank or or his email provider or whatever that is. It's obvious that he's talking to Citibank or Gmail or whatever that is. And if he were to tunnel over a VPN, the people looking at that connection couldn't do all all they would see is that it's a VPN. And and maybe it's Tunnel Bear or, you know, whatever one he happens to be using they in order to see where he connects to, they would need to look at Tunnel Bear servers and see what's going out. And of course, if you have lots of people using it, then then, you know, that's all aggregated and you don't really know. But to what you were saying, if you're hosting it at home, then your ISP gets to see what you're connecting to, because that's how this works. Right. So the potential additional benefit of using a VPN that you don't host yourself is that nobody will be able to see where you're going. Now, in this case, the people that host the VPN could. So for example, right, Tunnel Bear people or whoever is offering what we'll call, I guess, a cloud based VPN. Yeah. So they can see where you're going. But they're good people. Well, and they will tell you what what data they store. No, this is important. Like if you're looking for a VPN provider, check their FAQ. And I know that Tunnel Bear, they only store data about when you've connected and how long you're connected. And if you're on the free plan, how much data passes across your connection because it I think you get 500 megs or a gig per month free. And then after that, you know, they they stop you. But that's it. They don't store anything about where you've browsed. So even if they get a subpoena to say, you need to tell me, you know, was, you know, Dave connected in talking to whatever Citibank at this point in time. It's like, we don't we don't know. We don't store that data. So that's an important thing to check. There's another. There's another. Go ahead. I mean, potentially. So say, you know, they show up and say, OK, well, we want to watch where Dave Hamilton is going. Different. They could on the spot say it. But as you said, they don't store that data, right? And they shouldn't be storing that data because you trust them, right? But so but you need to look into that. And to be fair, this algo thing that I talked about, that is just you're just getting an instance of virtual servers, essentially what you're getting. And it's possible that the Amazon or or whatever, to Digital Ocean or whoever else you might use for that virtual server is tracking the data that comes in and out. Like they don't have the policies that VPN providers do. This is just you getting a cloud box and installing your own VPN on it. But there is another benefit, John, to to having a VPN, even having one at home. And I was reminded of it this morning when my son texted me from China and and he was connected to our home VPN and texting me no problem. Now, I message seems to work in China. He was connected to the Wi-Fi at the Beijing airport as they were going through immigration and then customs and then getting their connecting flight to go elsewhere in China. But he said he couldn't get on Snapchat until he connected to the VPN because what's commonly known as the Great Firewall of China, the government blocks a lot of social media and Snapchats, one of them. The ironic part is once he got connected to the VPN, so he was able to connect to our VPN here at the house. He was also able to connect to Pro XPN, Tunnel Bear, Cloak and our Algo server. So he tested all of them because, you know, that's what we geeks do. And we have the prodigy of our geeks does this, too. But he he was able to send me a Snapchat and Snapchat has a Beijing airport filter. So, yeah, right, you get the irony here, like it's blocked. And yet, if you get connected, sure, we've added a filter for you. But but so even having the VPN at home, very handy. And I've, of course, mentioned before that he also uses a VPN. So does my daughter. And most of their friends use a VPN when they're at school, because the school also blocks Snapchat. And I think Gmail, but that may have gone away now that the school uses Google Classroom for a lot of stuff. So anyway, yeah, it's very it. So there's many use cases. I use a VPN when I travel all the time, just for all of these reasons. But but the kind of the security one is the big one. But convenience, I know what's going to happen. I trust my DNS servers here at the house, right? That's another one you might, you know, you might be connected to what appears to be a secure wireless network. It has a password all of that, but it dictates your DNS. Even if you put in your own DNS server, you can, you know, filter that packet and sniff DNS and turn it around. Most home routers will let you do that. So they could, you know, start to hijack connections. If they want use a VPN. Nope, I trust my what DNS I've chosen to use. And that that's another important one. So right, because, you know, actually, I think the last time I set up my year old Dave, well, while I ran a name bench, yeah, which is a tool that can tell you your fastest, hmm. Yeah, your fast name servers, right? Sure. And the last time I ran it, the fastest was actually my ISP. So I have that as my primary choice. Yeah. And the second fastest was an open DNS one. Right. Those are the two that I have plugged in right now. Yep. So. But you also know, in theory, that those are going to deliver you DNS lookups that you trust. And that's the key. So. Yeah. As far as we know. Right. Right. Yeah. You got to trust somebody. Yeah. But yeah, if you're rolling your own VPN, who you choose to do DNS, you want to consider carefully. Yeah. Speed may not be like, in my case, speed is the most important. Sure. Yeah. Right. Some people they may not trust their. Well, speed is the most important after trust. I mean, I think you've you trust your ISP and there's nothing wrong with trusting your ISP. But if your ISP were fastest, but completely untrustworthy, I don't think you would use them. Right. I mean, I think you would use somebody else that that actually delivered good DNS lookups that you could trust. So I mean, you know, but there's nothing wrong with trusting your ISP. Just know what you're doing. It's an eyes wide open scenario. Yeah. But depending on where you are, your ISP, maybe the government. Right. Right. Like like China. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, it's very it was very interesting. But yeah, there you go. All right. A quick follow up from show 651 when we talked a little bit about VPNs, Robin writes, he says, in show 651, you mentioned the tiny hardware firewall as an added VPN layer. So your device never connects to the internet before VPN is established. I have one of these things now, by the way, this tiny hardware firewall is cool. So I'm going to I'm going to play with it a little bit more, but this thing's pretty awesome. He says, however, have you tried cloaks VPN? It's available for iOS and Mac. And of course we have Robin reminds us. Cloak can be configured to block all network connectivity on non-trusted networks until a VPN connection is established. No hardware needed. So that's a very interesting feature of Cloak and and why you might want to choose them. Cloak, those folks are doing a good job out there with the auto connection and really keeping it secure. So thank you for the for the reminder, Robin, this is good stuff. All right, we have a little bit of time left. I want to you want to you want to take us to Lionel, John? I like Linus. OK, go. So Lionel asks or says and asks when he says, coming up in a few weeks, I'll be heading to Cambodia and Thailand. All right, that sounds like fun. Yeah. Onyx has a feature. Onyx being one of our favorite Mac utilities that does all sorts of wonderful things. Onyx has a feature that allows you to hide either a drive or a folder from snooping eyes. OK, well, this function allow me to hide certain folders with sensitive data from the border authorities. Oh, that's interesting. Right. Because we've heard news reports about people coming in and at customs when you're not yet in the US and having their devices, you know, being being forced essentially forced is the wrong word, but it's efficient. So being forced to unlock their devices and turn them over to the authorities. And if you don't unlock your device, then you're detained and delayed and bad things happen. So so it sounds like Lionel wants to be able to unlock his device and have no fear about any sensitive data being winding up in the wrong hands. Yeah. So and so he continues, the folder is still there, but it's invisible to make it visible again through Onyx. OK, so doesn't the browser VPN provide any protection? Does a browser based VPN provide any protection at all from Wi-Fi snoopers? And thank you for all you do for the Mac community. You are welcome. So to answer your questions here. So I actually had never used the Onyx hide function. And so I checked it out. So you run on X, you go to utilities, you go to visibility. And there's a feature that hides a folder file and an application. So I'm like, oh, you know what, let me go there and let me let me hide a folder. Yeah. And see how good it is. Well, sure enough, once I hit it, Dave, from the finder, it disappeared. So security by obscurity. Because it's there. I mean, if you knew the where the folder was, you can go find it that. I mean, and why would be able to find it? Well, that's what I did is that I executed my mad hacking skills and within a couple of minutes. So the thing is, although it's invisible from the finder. So if that's what you're looking for, that you don't want a folder. Yeah, on quick glance, somebody's not going to see it. They're not going to see your folder title. You know, but if they clone your drive, which frankly would be the easiest thing to do, right? I mean, if you're if you say unlock your device and then they go and disappear with it for 20 minutes, that the simplest thing to do is to just clone the drive and then give your device back. And now they can take their sweet time right and snoop through it. So right. So I was able within seconds, Dave, to see that folder. So I hopped into the terminal and I went to that folder and I did an LS and it showed up. OK. So so if you're dealing with a newbie that is just doing a visual inspection, then yes, that that's sufficient. Right. And I also was able within the finder itself. If I went to the finder and I said, go and go to folder, I typed in the path of that folder and I was able to get into it from the finder. Sure. So so it a cursory inspection. Yes. But what I would recommend, Dave. I mean, the one thing I said, you know, at the very least, you want to protect your machine with the firewall, too. But, you know, and of course, password, you know, that password protects your machine and that you've got to provide the password to get in. But if they insist that you give the password, then that's not going to protect you. Right. However, Dave, there's a tool that we saw introduced a couple of couple of years ago. And I would recommend this if you have a concern here. And it's called Hyder for our friends at MacPaw. And what this does, Dave, is that it hides in Crips and password protects your data. So not one, not two, but three features. And if you if you want data to protect it from prying eyes, it introduces enough layers to protect your stuff where I think it's worth considering. They have a free trial and it only costs in 1995. So if you want to hide your data, I would I'd go with Hyder over Onyx. All right. Yeah, I don't know if I don't know if you have any other thoughts on that. No, I agree. Yeah, you would want to encrypt it. I mean, you could create an encrypted disk image, too, which is built into your Mac. And it's not quite the the same simple user experience that Hyder offers. No great surprise there, right? But it is there on your Mac. If you forgot to download Hyder, well, you could use, you know, on the plane, you could use your disk image and go from there. So, yeah. Right. And in both cases, the thing is, so if they do, you know, if they're being especially snoopy and they do clone your drive, when they try to get it, that piece of data, it's going to ask for a password, which hopefully you're not going to give them. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. Or it's going to be different from your system password. All right. To the second question, and this was interesting. I hadn't, you know, we're talking about the hands, Dave. I do have something to note. Now, Hyder is made by MacPaw, who makes Clean by Mac, but they're also the ones that make SetApp, right? Which is freaking awesome. Ten bucks a month, Netflix for apps, right? And there's, I think I checked yesterday, there's 73 apps in there. I assumed Hyder would be in there because it's a Mac. So why wouldn't it? It's not. So just FYI. Yeah, and we did get a note from them. They recently added a, I guess, you know, a search feature. Oh, this is awesome in SetApp. Because yeah, now you can go on the website and look for the apps, and they've organized them into the, it's fantastic actually. I'm a huge fan of SetApp. I'm using it constantly. I just found this thing in there called Fluid, John. Do you use that? It's an Instagram client. Oh, sorry, not Fluid. Fluid's the other thing. That's, Fluid's not in there. I don't think. Flume, F-L-U-M-E. It's an Instagram client for your Mac. It's actually really cool. So anyway, I just wanted to talk about SetApp. Yeah, yeah. So sweet. Okay. To the second question. Yes. I'm going to scratch my head over this. I think what he was asking is if I'm using a browser-based VPN, is my traffic sent over an open Wi-Fi secured? And as far as I know, yeah. Well, the thing is I actually had to look this up, Dave. I wasn't really familiar with the concept of a browser-based VPN, but apparently. Yeah, you can get them for, Safari, I don't think there are any, but Chrome certainly. No, like I did look, and so for example, TunnelBear offers a browser-based version of their product for, yeah, I think it's Chrome and Opera. Okay, that makes sense. Because I guess their architecture supports you writing a VPN plug-in. Yeah, I searched also for Safari and I searched the extension. No, Apple doesn't let you do that. Yeah. Yeah. So the answer is yes, it'll protect your browsing. But you know if you can, as we discussed, I'd go for a big boy VPN to protect all your traffic. Yeah, the thing is, yeah, without running a system-wide VPN, you don't, like if you happen to have mail open in the background, it's going to be checking for your email even while you're, you know, in your browser doing whatever stuff you have over the VPN. And so you've got this personally identifiable stuff potentially going over now. I mean, hopefully your email connection is also secured most of all now. Yeah, I mean, it should be using SSL. Right. But still people are seeing, oh, he's checking email, you know, and he hasn't counted fast mail or Yahoo or whatever. Or NSA. Yeah, exactly. I never check my NSA email over an insecure connection check. But that is a good point. That is a true statement, by the way. I never check my NSA email over an insecure connection. None of us do. Right. Exactly. And neither confirm nor deny that we check our NSA. Right. No, I can confirm. I never do it over an insecure connection. Actually, one other thought for Lionel is, I mean, Heider does this and that you can also put your sensitive stuff on an external drive and protect it. You suggested as much with an encrypted disk image. What's the one, Dave? True Crypt, I think, is also another option. And that the strategy here is that you store your sensitive data on a flash drive and maybe keep that in your pocket and maybe they won't notice that you have it. So isolating your sensitive data onto an external drive, whether it be a flash drive or an external hard drive, maybe another strategy. Yeah. Like, for example, I have a, I get a USB, let's see USB three drive on my key chain and I've never had anybody, you know, fiddle with it. And now you need to put a tiny hardware firewall on your key chain, man. I'm serious about this. It's pretty cool. You got to check this out. Yeah, I should check that out. Yeah. Yeah. The nice thing is that most people that make the flash drives like this one, for example, that they do offer security layer. Under it as well. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Fun stuff. Yeah, man. Well, this was, uh, this was interesting. I think. And fun, but our time now is, uh, has come to an end. We mentioned the NSA one too many times, I think, John. Don't you think? Yeah. Hold on. Somebody's knocking on the door. Don't answer. Don't answer. Better. Uh, 224-888-Geek is the phone number you can call. John Geek is. 4335. You can find us on Facebook. Visit macgeekgab.com slash Facebook that will direct you directly to our Facebook group where we all answer each other's questions and, uh, and participate there during the week when we're not here. Very, very good stuff. A great group to be a part of. We would love to have you. It's of course free and open to anyone. That's how we do it. 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