 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekgab, episode 699 for Monday, March 5th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekgab, the show that takes your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We mix it all up and we make like salad. It's like salad. But the thing is, the extra ingredient that's dressing on the salad is answers to your questions, hopefully. And all sorts of other little delicious things, like maybe a crouton here or there in the form of a quick tip that you didn't even know was coming. All that great stuff right there. And because it's salad, it's healthy and good for you, too. Sponsors for this episode include Smile, where at TextExpander.com slash podcast, you get 20% off of your first year's subscription to TextExpander. We'll talk more about that in a minute. And also, Barebone Software, the makers of the fine BVE edit. Now, tastier because it's 64-bit. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut, getting ready for yet another winter disaster. This is John F. Braun. How you doing, Mr. John F. Braun? Yeah, you saw, we're going to get another one. I, yeah, I heard people talking about that. That's right. Yeah, did you get anything? Have we spoken sensibly? There was something Friday or whatever that you got, but we didn't really, right? That was wind, wind and rain. That's okay. So we got the same thing, wind and rain. Yeah, that's right. But actually, I say that, and it's true, we did get wind and rain here. But, you know, 10 miles away down on the coast, some like major massive flooding and also in Boston too, massive flooding. So, oh, same here. Our, our, no, I saw, you know, stamp a lot of coastal territories near me. Not good flooding. Our town is actually put measures in place to make sure that doesn't happen. And it's actually lowered my flood insurance. Hey, that's good. Which is a good thing. Yeah. But, um, and as far as salad, you know, salads. I don't know where that came from, man. Once you put the dressing on, it's not healthy. And no folks, a taco salad is definitely not. And no, no, no, you can have healthy dressing and we do. Oh, our dressing is healthy. Yeah, just don't get the stuff with all the like, like make your own and make it nonfat if you want even. It's all good for you. I like blue cheese myself. Oh, see, I put oil and vinegar on, olive oil. And now that's still got fat in it. Don't get me wrong. But you know, it's olive oil. I figure that's that's good for you. I don't know. Let's talk about like Mac stuff, though. Yeah, let's go to Eric here. And if I can pull up Eric's question, I will ask it. Do you have a trusted Mac app that securely deletes files after I make an encrypted image of my passwords? I'd like to securely delete the source files. Yeah. So this is this is an interesting one, John, because I used to be able to in the finder. I could option click the finder menu and get it to change from empty trash to secure empty trash. However, that doesn't exist anymore. And I think the reason it doesn't exist is because I'm running SSDs on all the Macs upon which I can test it. And I don't think they write because you can't secure delete on an SSD because the file system can't overwrite a file like that. It just like it or it doesn't work that same way. I think it's because the with an SSD, you can't really predict where what memory cell is being used for a right. Correct. I probably write operation. That's right. Yeah. Even when you was where we talk secure race. So what we mean by secure race is that you basically and actually you can do this with a rotational drive, like with even with this utility. And it basically rolls through the drive and writes various patterns to every sector, which you can predictably do on a rotational drive, but you cannot do right on an SSD. However, there is, you know, I know we had this come up. The thing is some SSDs support the issuance. I think I got that right of a secure a race. The whole thing command. Yes, that's right. But not all. So through the finder, you can't you cannot do it. Here's. But you also can't reliably recover anything from an SSD either. So like there's there's tradeoffs. So I think the point is not only is secure race not doable on an SSD in many cases, but I don't want to say all. It's also not necessarily as important as it was on a rotational drive or as it is on a rotational drive. That said, really the way to do this is to use whole disk encryption like, you know, File Vault 2 and and then your golden, I think. And then that that's that. But you could use something like Clean My Mac has a shredder functionality inside it. So you could do that if you if you so desire. Right. Again, I don't I don't know if. Yeah, I'm with you. I don't know if with an SSD that necessarily use whole disk encryption. There you go. That's I think is the answer. So unless somebody manages to guess your password. Right. Yes, your encryption key. That's right. Yeah, your encryption key. Then yeah, that that should do it for you. Cool. Right. Yeah, I think so. All right. Finn asks, he says, I've got a Mac mini from 2010 and I installed an SSD in it that I use via home sharing to watch movies on my Apple TV. I noticed that after the SSD was installed, it now has a different name under find my iPhone. It used to say or maybe I don't know if he means find my iPhone. But he says it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, probably that's probably true. It says it used to say Fin's Mac mini, but now says Mac's MacBook. I went to the genius bar and they told me to reset my Apple TV. But this has not helped. I've tried reinstalling OSes, of course, and have home sharing turned on. Everything else works. I can airplay to the TV. It did ask for a code for my Mac or on my Mac from the TV. Tried everything. Please help. So I think he's talking about. I think he's talking about the home sharing name. But maybe I'm missing something here. It's hard to hard to understand. Well, the home sharing name. There are two places where you can set the name of your Mac. One is if you go to system preferences, sharing computer name. And that will let you set the name of your computer there. And that's what should appear when you look for, you know, find my Mac and all that stuff. And then for home sharing, that's in a different spot. That's in iTunes, preferences, general library name. And that's where you set what appears in home sharing for your iTunes library. And the nice part, the reason you would want to have a different name there is you could use two separate iTunes libraries. Here comes one of those croutons, right? When you launch iTunes, if you hold down the option key, you'll get a dialogue that lets you select a different library or create a new one. And of course, then you would have two libraries and you might want to name them differently so that you know which one you're attaching to remotely or from another, not remotely, but from a different computer on the same network. So that's that's where I'm at with it. What do you think, John? I don't like sharing, so I don't share. No, terrible person. That's right. Well, it's like your your sister is more than four years older than you, right? Is that right? No. Oh, I was going to say the delta is two. OK, I was going to I was going to say, you know, that there was something I was reading where they said that kids that are more than four or more years apart essentially grow up like no, not that much differently from an only child. So I was going to I was going to give you an excuse for why you didn't like sharing. But sorry, man, I don't have it. I got nothing. OK, shall we move on to Simon then? Indeed. All right. Simon writes find it. It's always there. Simon writes, how can I get both domains to show up when I am sending email from my iPhone with my Gmail account? I found that if I set up the account manually as an I map account, then I can add in the addresses. But if I just set it up as a Gmail account and choose the Gmail path, I cannot add additional addresses. And you're totally right. And he says the problem is this will only allow fetch emails when I set it up manually, whereas I can do push emails if I set it up using the Gmail preference in the mail settings in iOS. And you're totally right about all of those things. And manual accounts can't be pushed. They can only be fetched and that accounts set up as Gmail in iOS mail cannot have multiple addresses attached to them, whereas manual accounts can. And again, for those of you like croutons, if you go to settings mail on your iOS device, it's not settings mail anymore, move this stuff around, settings, accounts and passwords on your iOS device. And then you go to your mail account and you go into account again, only for accounts that are manual set up like that. On the email address, you can tap that and you'll see the option then to choose add another email. So this is in settings, accounts and passwords. Then you pick your account and you go into the account and you tap on the email address and you can add a bunch here. And if your outgoing mail server supports it, you can send mail from all of those different addresses. Here's the frustrating part. If you go into Gmail's web interface, you can do the same thing. You can add accounts in the same way and you've got to configure them and prove that you own them and confirm and all that stuff. But you can have them there. Those don't translate over to the iOS mail app when you have it set up as Gmail and there's no way to add on the iPhone. But if you run the Gmail app, like if you go to the app store and download Gmail, that'll see all those addresses. So you could do it that way if you want to have it set up as Gmail, but then you got to use a different app. So there's like you don't get there's like three things and you get to pick your favorite two and that's it. Right. Yeah. And I saw a suggestion here at our chat room. Where is our chat room, Dave? Mackeycap.com slash stream. Yes. And we have a lively bunch in there almost every week. Right. Almost lively. They're always lively. Yeah. The other suggestion is you may want to use a different email client and Kiwi. Kiwi Graham says he uses Outlook. There you go. Yeah. For his Gmail accounts. And and I think I actually saw that our friend replied to us. And is it Spark, I think? Uh-huh. I think that's another client. So the thing is, you may want to try another email client. But I don't think you'll get push notifications with anything other than Apple's built-in client. I mean, you'll get Pseudo push, right? In that you can get a notification if the server supports it. But in terms of like mail actually being pushed to your device, no. The only way to do that is with the mail app, I think. But somebody in the chat room will correct me if I'm wrong. Brian Monroe also there suggests that if this person is truly using the G Suite, which is the Google apps for business, then you can use the exchange option to connect to that. And that will inside mail let you do both of those things. So you could have that if, in fact, it's G Suite. So there you go. Yeah, fun. I don't know. It's crazy. It's always stuff, you know. That's cool. I was breaking the rules or bending the rules. Yeah, I don't know. Whatever they want, whatever they want. Yeah, yeah. Brother Jay has an interesting question, John. We're just pouring through these here today. That's good. It says, I know not when it began, but this must end. My built-in annoyance meter can monitor it no more. Every single time a volume, including a snapshot, is unmounted. I should say I should say that more accurately. And every single time a volume is unmounted and that includes snapshots. Safari launches Safari. He says not Safari technology preview, but Safari. And it doesn't load any page. It just comes up blank. I set up no automation anywhere. Why does Mac OS launch Safari? A browser I never use whenever a volume is unmounted. This peculiar behavior has persisted since the initial batch of high Sierra public beta builds. The only thing about which I am certain is that this has gone on far too long. And I am thoroughly annoyed, irritated and exasperated. OK. Yeah, that's weird, man. It shouldn't happen, of course. Doesn't happen here. Probably doesn't happen for you, right, John? How would you even make that up? I'm just trying to think how you even make that happen. Well, that's what I started thinking. Right. Is if I wanted if I like if that were desired behavior, how would I do it? And that's when I came up with launch services. Launch services can be done, can be used to do a lot of cool things. And it can trigger off of many, many things in the OS. And and so it's possible that you've got something out there and launch services that is set, that has essentially told the system any time a disk is ejected, go and do this other action, which in your case results in launching Safari with a blank window. The way to check that, the best way to check that is to use a third party app called Lingon, L-A-N-G-O-N. And Lingon will will show you everything in launch services. And I'm hoping that on your system, you'll find something because other than that, I mean, I guess there could be a background app running, right, you know, you could have some menu bar extra or something running that that does that. I mean, I like that would be the other way, right? It's a process, but but you could do it there. I don't know where else, John, right? A third party app could do that if it were running all the time, I think. I mean, I'm wondering if I mean, we talked recently about default apps. It's the utility that shows you what extensions are mapped to certain actions. OK, I could get tedious trying to go through that and find out what is making this happen. But there may well, but it might not be an app. That's what I'm that's what I'm saying is I mean, it could be. But I don't like what app would that I don't think there's a URL called. When a drive is ejected. Oh, I mean, I mean, Webdav, maybe kind of, you know, when a drive is webdav is webdav is kind of a URL way to access. Yeah, unaccess them. Yeah. Yeah. OK, I see where you're going with this. I'm kind of reaching. No, no, no. But OK, right. Yeah, so checking to see what Webdav is set to open with. Yeah, all right. Webdav, for those that don't know, so Webdav is a protocol where you can access a drive over HTTP, right? Did I get that right? Yeah. So and you can access Webdav drives with URL usually begins, I guess, with Webdav. Does it? That's what I'm that's what I'm checking here. Um, no, Safari can't open Webdav drive dot local because Mac OS doesn't recognize Internet addresses starting with Webdav. No, I think Webdav is HTTP. It's been I don't use it off. Maybe other browsers on it, but just just reaching. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I would I would go with the. I'd look in Lingon. I would say Burnett with fire. Alex in the chat room suggests starting up with the shift key held down to skip all of the third party apps from launching would rule out whether or not this is an app. And so at least there would be that. I don't think it turns off launch services. So that would be one way of isolating. If it still happens that way, at least then, you know, without driving yourself crazy, just putting everything. You know, whether it's an app or not, holding down shift is safe mode, which loads only Apple stuff and not third party stuff. Right. Right. Right. That's correct. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Or again, like I said, Burnett with fire just to, you know, reformat and you don't want to do that. So good question. I think it's a it's a geek challenge because I've never seen that. So Alex also found a piece of software. This might turn into more of a more of a crouton than anything else. He found something called undock from flying paper software. And what undock does is know a simple critical piece to your Mac and eject all shortcut with superpowers. So maybe, I don't know. It's a cool thing, though. Right. You can eject all your removable drives with one click. So it's like a it's like a surprise. Cool stuff found is what that is. I don't I don't think that's that that would be the cause of this. And Alex agrees, actually. But that's a pretty cool one. I like that. So we'll call that the bonus cool stuff found right there. I like it. Good. All right. Hey. So. You know what I want to do? I want to talk about both of our sponsors here, John. And then I want to talk about Chi because we have a lot to talk about with Chi. I think. Why did they spell it? They spell it wrong. Well, they I mean, that's how it's been spelled for forever. Oh, OK. All right. Cool. It just irks me. Yeah. Well, I'm going to talk about our sponsors here. Our first sponsor for. Oh, yeah. Our first sponsor for today is Smile, where at SmileSoftware.com slash podcast or actually TextExpander.com slash podcast. You get 20 percent off your first year of TextExpander, which is a tool that I can't imagine not having on my Mac. In fact, as we were prepping the show today, I invoked one of my TextExpander snippets. We have one that takes an Amazon URL and converts it into a Mac ikeb affiliate URL, which is what we use like in our show notes and stuff. And I invoked that nothing didn't work. I'm like, oh, that's right. I was doing something else before and I was quitting apps. And I wound up quitting TextExpander. So, of course, I relaunched TextExpander, but it hadn't been off for it had actually been off for a couple hours, but I hadn't used this computer in those couple hours. Like it like it took minutes of useful time for me to realize it wasn't running. And it's used for exactly that. Like you can you can do various things. Like I talk about how I have your address in there, John, so that when people ask to ship you something, I can just type comma JBADD and boom, it fills out your address. I don't have to remember your address or anything for me. What's that? That's for sure good for me. Well, mine for me is DHADD for address. Not it's no, there's no diagnosis involved in this, John. It's just JBADD and boom, there's your address. Yeah. Oh, OK. I thought you were. No, I'm not diagnosing. No, medical. That's right. But you can also do cool things like where I have a piece of an Amazon URL. I take the product ID and I put that on the clipboard. And then I have a TextExpander snippet that builds the whole URL, putting that part from the clipboard in exactly the right spot. Right. So it can be really, really smart about these things. I highly recommend you check this out. It's one of my favorite utilities. So please do go to TextExpander.com podcast, and that's where you can download it and get all set up. And you get 20 percent off of your first year. So thanks to the folks at TextExpander and Smile for sponsoring this episode. Bear Bones is our second sponsor. And Bear Bones also makes a piece of software that I rarely don't have running on my Mac. And of course, BB Edit is what I'm talking about. And that is running on my Mac right now. I use it to manage all the text files for our show notes. I use it, of course, when I'm programming and need to edit some, you know, some code, either PHP or JavaScript. But you can I mean, just because I don't code in in C doesn't mean you can't. And if you do, well, BB Edit will recognize that and format the text on the screen nicely for you. You can use it to count words and documents. You can use it. I do all the time to compare two text files really handy. And you can invoke it from the terminal. Who doesn't like that? You go to the terminal, but, you know, you don't want to have to like edit in a, you know, nano window or an Emacs or heaven forbid, a VI window, although I prefer to Emacs. Actually, hey, careful, careful. I like VI. I don't like my fingers know how to do it, but I don't like to do it. So but I type BB Edit and edit there. And now I get to use my mouse and be, you know, like civilized. I don't have to be fighting in the command line or whatever. So it's really awesome. You got to check it out. Go to barebones.com, check out BB Edit. I mentioned it last time and I'm going to mention it this time now with version 12.1 64 bits of goodness. Yes, that's right. BB Edit is ready for the future. That app, I think, is more than twice as old as this podcast. If that's telling you something and now up to date, 64 bits ready for the future. Our thanks to the folks at barebones at barebones.com. For sponsoring this episode and for making BB Edit really for everything. Thanks, folks. All right. Now it's time for some chi love, John. So chi qi qi, which is what we also call. Yeah, we call it wireless charging. I really, we should be calling it contactless charging, right? Inductive, inductive charge. OK, there you go. Yeah, most accurate term. It's magic, but it's a electromagnetic magic. Yeah, yeah. So it's the thing that allows you to take your iPhone 8 or 8 plus or iPhone 10 and put it on some sort of magic pad that then just starts charging. You don't have to plug it in. It's beautiful if you have one of these. Apple doesn't include a cheap ad in the box, but but you can go and get one. And they're relatively inexpensive. You can get them for like about 10 bucks. John and I, we've been through a few of these things and I wanted to kind of go through it because one of the most important places that I can think of to charge your chi devices or your iPhone is right next to your bed. And it's super convenient if you don't have to fool with plugging in a cord every time. But what's worse is when you've got a bright blue light shining in your eye, trying to sear your retina through your eyelid throughout the night just because your phone is charging next to the bed. So we started looking at these things and we found some that work next to the bed very well. And we found some that don't. So I'm going to start with one that doesn't. The first one that I got is the Powerbot Chi Puck that has very bright LEDs. It's green when it's not doing anything and it's blue when it's charging. And it's 10 bucks on Amazon. I use it at my desk and I love it. It's great, but wow, it's way too bright next to the bed. So I say no bedtime for the Powerbot Chi Puck, but it's 10 bucks. So, you know, cool. Yeah. Right, John, good. Good. No, I don't like it. And, you know, I got to shake. I have to say I shake my fist at any vendor that makes a product that has blindingly bright blue LEDs. Yeah, I don't know why some feel it's necessary. Or at least give me an option to turn it off or dim it or there's something. Any LED is that's lit all the time is too bright, if you ask me. Yes, as Brian Monroe in the chat room says, you can put black tape over, you know, electrical tape or whatever over the light. But I actually like to have some indication as to what's going on, because the puck will tell you if there's a problem like this one, I think it turns red or flashes even if there's an issue and you need to remove the phone and let it reset and then try again. So I'd like to see the light. I just don't want it on all the time. The one that I had that I had been using for a little while is the Monoprice Chi adapter or puck, rather. I also I think it sits right at 10 bucks. It was when I last looked that one's pretty good. It's it's red when it's not charging and it's blue when it is. But the lights way dimmer than the power bot one. So this I just turned the light away from my bed so it's not aiming at me. And it's fine. It's still there. And it certainly lights up my bedside table enough that I could like fumble around to find chapstick or whatever. But but it's it doesn't keep me awake. So if you want a puck style thing with no light or not no light, but lower light, the Monoprice one works. What do you have one you have a puck right that you use, John? Yes, so I got one. It's almost sacrilege. But I think I got it through thrifter, which is a thing we mentioned in the past that that lists deals. And and although it retails for forty dollars, so it's a Samsung charger. OK, yeah, which is why I say it's kind of sacrilege using it. You know, Samsung. Oh, I see. It makes Android phones to charge an iPhone. Sure. But they had a thing and they're like, yeah, it's 15 bucks oddly enough that then they redirect you to Amazon or in my case they did. Yeah. And it's funny because the black one was 15 bucks and the white one was 40 bucks. And I'm like, huh, but OK, whatever. But I like this one because the LED is subdued and then it has a blue. So the thing is, there's no LED when it's just sitting there. So they give you a USB. USB, I think it's a, you know, two amp or something. So you have it comes with its own USB wall wart, OK, and then you plug it in. But the thing is, the light is not on unless there's something on it charging. And when it is, it's a very subtle blue LED. The weird thing is that they they say in the documentation, which is very sparse, that the LED should turn from blue to green when the phone is fully charged. And at least in the case of my iPhone eight. I never saw it do that. The thing is, it's fine. And it's also a and I used a I-stat mini to measure this. So I-stat mini can actually tell you the power from this. So this thing provides six watts of power, which is not fast charging. But it's, you know, I mean, it gets the job done. Sure, it will eventually charge it. So I'm very happy with it. And the deals are kind of in flux with this thing. Because I've seen dimension. Another thing that somebody told us about honey, slow down, slow down, slow down. Let's just stay on the cheat topic here. I don't want to go too far on the cheat topic. Yeah, OK, but no, I'm happy with it. I got two of them, 15 bucks. It offers six watts of power and there you go. And it doesn't blind you. That's cool. That's cool. Yeah, the iPhone will not do the full 10 watts of fast charging, but it will do up to seven and a half watts of charging. If the if the puck supports it. So, yeah. The third or the third thing that I've tried in the bedroom next to the bed is the one that I'm now using. And it's the Ventev wireless charge stand. This thing's pretty cool because it's got like the typical little puck in it. But the puck is movable inside the stand so you can set it at the height that makes sense and you can either have your phone in portrait mode or landscape mode, you just kind of lean it up on this stand and it just starts charging when you lean it up on the stand because you're leaning it up against the puck. But you can adjust the angle of the stand by kind of flipping the stand around or you can, you know, and or you can adjust the orientation of your phone on the thing. So that's what I've been using now. It is a 15 watt charger, of course, it'll only charge the iPhone at seven and a half. But what I really like is that when I put my phone on it, it flashes blue for a little while to tell me, hey, you're in good shape, we're charging and it's a dim blue light at that. And then it goes out. No light on persistently at all. And that to me is the best because that way I'm not adding any more light to the bedroom. It's just right there. And the phone's up on a thing, so I'm not fumbling around. It's not sliding all over the place. So that's that's my current one. That one, if you go to Amazon, you can get it. It's not, of course, it's not 10 bucks. It's 60 bucks and but it's got a little more to it. So, you know, then it charges faster and all that good stuff. So there you go. That's my that's the one I'm using on the bed. I'm I'm traveling, though, John. And and so I've been thinking, OK, what am I going to use? Because, you know, like, what am I going to use? Well, I could plug my phone in, you know, like a caveman, John, while I'm traveling. But that doesn't sound so good. No, I checked out this thing. It's from a company called Bezelel, B-E-Z-A-L-E-L. And they actually make quite a few things. But the one that I'm talking about here is their Prelude, which is a portable wireless puck. It has a battery in it. It's, you know, a little thicker than your typical Cheapuck, but it's got a battery in it so that you can charge this up and you can charge your phone any time you want. It's a 7000 milliamp hour battery. So if you don't have a convenient placed on the nightstand in the hotel room to plug in, no problem. Charge the puck up during the day, bring it over to the nightstand, put your phone on it, you're good to go. Your phone's right there. It's charging wirelessly. Everybody's happy and you don't need to plug in. It's truly wireless charging, right? It's just right there from the battery. So so that's, you know, and they they they'll get 60 bucks for that, too. But I think that's a pretty cool thing. So I'm looking forward to that with my with my trip to South by Southwest next week. So that's what I got there, John. I do have a couple other things, but it sounded like you had something to add. Now South by Southwest, man, hope you get some. I hear they have good barbecue in Texas. That's the plan. So while we're on the while we're on the Qi thing, one more, because to me, this is the place where Qi works really well. I've been a big fan of the the mounts in the car that a plug into the now unused CD, you know, port, whatever, you know, it just does a pressure mount in there. But the ones I really like are the ones where you put your phone in and there's a little trigger that trips the like some some clamps that come down and hold your phone so you can just pop your phone right under the charger with one hand and or on to the Mount with one hand. Now, previously, I would have to plug in, but I Ot dt So it yeah, I know it's pretty cool and it works great. I've got it in the car. You just plug it in and you're good to go. So yeah, it's pretty cool. It's 50 bucks for the for the one with the chi in it. It comes with a suction mount that you can put on your dash or whatever. But I Audi has a whole line of products. And so you can they're sort of modular. So you can take the suction mount off and put a CD mount on. And that's what I've got in the car now. And now I just get in the car and pop it up and it just automatically starts charging. So it's pretty good. I think, yeah, you know, I know when I and when I posted the the stats of that I measured, actually, one of my friends, my pal Scott out in Arizona said, oh, yeah, my car actually has a cheap charger. I guess really the latest thing. Apparently some new vehicles, which is not me. Right. Have that built in along with, you know, all the other high tech toys like Bluetooth and carplay. Wow. So wow, that's pretty neat. So something to look for in your next vehicle. You want to charge your phone while you're on the road. Yeah, well, it's nice that this is a standard. Like you said, you bought, you know, a Samsung cheep ad and we're talking. I mean, we didn't mention one Apple device here. And they all just work because it's a standard, which is, you know, great. Thank you, Apple, for doing that. It's pretty good because the watch I'm I remember when the watch came out, like somebody dug into it and said, yeah, it's cheap, but not really not in a way that you could put it on a cheap ad. It needs like the magnets and whatever. So I don't know. It's crazy. What do you think, John? Anything else? Do we have anything else to say on the whole chi thing or are we time to move on? I'm. Hey, I'm a fan, you know, same, you know, decided to upgrade, you know, my phone, even though I didn't have to, but I could. And and that's one of the benefits of the eight or the 10 or the X 10 X, which is yeah, whatever. Yeah, yeah, right. It's a 10. Yeah. But yeah, it's cool. It's I like the wireless charging. It's a and if you've got an eight or an eight plus or a 10 and you haven't done this yet, really, it's, you know, 10 bucks. It's pretty cool to be able to just pop your phone down and have it off and running. So check it out. All right, John, before we move too far along, I want to say a big thank you to all of our MacGygab premium subscribers. So thank you to all of you. If you want to learn more about premium and you're not already a premium subscriber, go to MacGygab.com slash premium or even just MacGygab.com. There's a link right there, obviously. You can get you can learn about it. It's really for those of you that can and want to support us directly. And so we've got it all set up. You do get access to a very special premium at MacGygab.com email address where we prioritize those questions that come in and we try to help you out as much as we can. So it's our way of saying thank you back this week. We had on the biannual $25 every six month plan. We had Nick S, Martin B, Peter M, Jonathan C, Seth R, Bartek B, Eric WB, Jean R, Sandpiper, Bruce W, Randall S, Rob H, Daniel C, Jeff S, Douglas S, Bob P and Matt C. And in the monthly ten dollar plan, we have Chris F, the B man, Michael L, Bob P, Jason A, Olga P, Greg S, Ward J, Petter H, Jim E, Elizabeth B, David M and John B. And then also on the monthly plan, but at 15, Micah P. So thank you to all of you, really. It's it's awesome. And it inspires us to really keep doing what we're doing here. And we appreciate it. So thanks. Shall we go on to a question? A last minute entry to the agenda, John? Whoa. All right. All right. Just pre-show network guy in the chat room asked, if money were no object, what is the fastest wireless router? And it's actually kind of interesting because we've been talked. We've been talking about this, the three of us, but also with Alison Sheridan is the third party here, because she started doing some testing and asking some really good questions. And she put an article up. We'll actually link to it where she tested two Netgear routers. She tested the Orbi mesh and the Nighthawk X8. And as she was testing him, she shot me an email and said, why am I seeing much faster speeds, you know, from the X8, the standalone router, the as opposed to the Orbi, which is mesh, isn't mesh supposed to be faster? And you're right. And the answer is, well, you know, it depends because the X8, if you want a fast router, truly where speed is the most important thing. A four by four wireless router, which means it has four streams in each direction on each radio is going to be the fastest. Even though most of your Apple devices only support two by two, a four by four router can tune the best two streams towards you, as opposed to just it's only two streams if it's just a two by two router. And Alison was seeing like double speeds. She saw what, three hundred thirty eight megabits per second on on the night gear, the Nighthawk X8. And it was like 170 something on the Orbi. Now, and so there to answer your question, the Nighthawk X8 is most definitely a router to consider. It's one of my favorites. It's from Netgear. It's a four by four router. It's actually got three radios in it. It's got two five gigahertz and one two point four gigahertz. And every single one of them is a is a four by four radio. So you've got all those streams, which is great. I really got the streams and then you got the frequency. And then I guess you got the negotiated what that could. I just want to help people understand that the multiple factors here. So one is a number of streams. So more is better, of course. But then the frequency that's selected is another aspect of this. And then the speed that is negotiated between the client and. The router is the third part of it. And if everything, if all the gears mesh, then you get these wonderful speeds. That's true. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. But but even when the gears don't all mesh and no pun intended with using that word of four by four router in all the tests that I have done, winds up serving any client faster than a two by two router in the same spot. And that's again, just because those extra streams can can be used to tune and select the best one for that client device. And it really does make a difference. The Synology RT 2600 AC, which is just a two band, it's just got one five gigahertz and one 2.4 gigahertz. That one also way faster than any of the two by two radios that are out there just because it's, you know, it's got those extra streams. So a four by four by four routers with the extra streams are far and away, going to be faster, all else being equal. But it's worth noting that mesh might make things faster if you're having coverage issues, right? Mesh is out there to solve coverage issues and congestion issues, right? Because you've got multiple radios all over the place so different clients can connect and you're not tying up just one radio or one set of radios on a router. So depending on the shape of your house, if one router serves everywhere in your house, then you might be better off with one of these standalone four by four routers like we've just discussed. If you have sort of a sprawling house or things are spread out or you have, you know, maybe air conditioner ducks or a refrigerator in the wrong space, wrong place or whatever, something blocking radio waves. Then mesh can really be your friend because it can help you kind of, you know, navigate around that by sort of, you know, relaying the radio waves as it were. So there you go. That's my thought. Right. It's coverage versus speed. And you got to decide what the what the right thing is for you. The really nice part about mesh is if you have a problem, you just go and put another mesh point in and you can begin to solve those problems. Whereas, you know, if you if you just have a standalone router, now maybe you're trying to move things around and and all that stuff. And, you know, even though Allison tested and found it, you know, we're talking about three hundred thirty eight megabits a second in her house versus one seventy in her house. One seventy is still pretty fast. Like Netflix isn't going to be any different for you on either of those connections. Now, well, Netflix, even at the highest definition, I think is less than ten megabits a second, I think. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you don't need a lot of pipe to do even HD video. So. Right. Right. So it depends. I mean, if you're really pumping like lots of data around, maybe you have a, you know, you're you're editing video or like something like that. Then then downloading. Yeah. Or, you know, pirating, you know, movies and stuff like that. But even then, like how fast and you want the maximum bandwidth. So you don't get caught. Right. Right. Yeah. Good luck with that. Use a VPN so you don't get caught, folks. There's your there's your crouton for that. Yeah. Otherwise, your cable. Are you really like tons? Don't I know that I'm going to buy you some croutons. It's just extra. Brian Monroe asked in the chat room, what's the fastest mesh? He said, isn't the Orbi the fastest mesh? And this is a little bit. There's there's some points of confusion here. The Orbi, when it talks to clients, is always two by two radios. For its backhaul, the high end Orbi has a four by four radio that it talks that it does all its backhaul with. And that's a separate radio from the two that talk to clients. So it can be faster. But in terms of that raw speed to the client, no, it's not, especially when you're talking right from the router or from the main unit. Right. The thing you mentioned that the so the the mesh products that support wired backhaul, I think have the potential to offer you better overall performance. And I think the Orbi is one that does support that. It does now as of November. Yeah, it didn't originally. All right. Yep. Yeah. If you can do wired backhaul, but again, you're still limited to those two by two radios on the front hall side. But ubiquities amplify HD is has three by three radios in it. So I think that's the fastest consumer mesh right now, because all the heroes are all two by two. The Orbi's are two by two to the clients. The Amplify is three by three. So again, but again, it all depends on your layout change that. What's that? So I have I have Euro Gen one. Didn't the Gen two add something? It added a radio, but it did not radio. It didn't add stream. Correct. Correct. OK. Yeah. Yeah. I think I have that right. Right. Euro Gen two on ninety nine point. Six percent certain about that. Yeah, it's two by two radios. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah. Personally, I mean, with a 1200 square foot two story house here, you know, one is I'm I'm I'm just fine. Yeah, you'd be fine with anything we mentioned already. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Good. Good. Good. Shall we go on to Bill, John? Where are we here? You're going to take us to Bill. Is Bill mine? Oh, yes. This Bill can this one gets kind of interesting. So let me let me bring it up here. Yeah, we kind of went all over the place here. But here's what Bill says. And this may be a this may be a geek challenge. Dave, I don't know if you read over this. But so Bill says I've run across some weird Mac OS 10.13.3 behavior that seems to involve the finder crashing. I'm having trouble pinning down the cause. However, some of the symptoms. Keyboard maestro can't open finder windows and macros or log windows from menus. Bebe at it, oh, won't close apparently because it can't read or write a certain file and it won't display lines that contain certain characters such as a check mark, then display that display fine and text at it. Another symptom, carbon copy, cloner and backblaze don't run schedule backups. Another one, I get up in the AM to find a computer has shut down. Perhaps when carbon copy, cloner or backblaze tried to run the night before. And finder windows won't open from the dock. In the first and last case, restarting the finder usually fixes the problem for a while. And I suspect that the other symptoms may really back to the finder and or file system. Perhaps carbon copy, cloner or backblaze can't open files, therefore they don't run. Here's what I've done to try to fix it. Run on X, and I assume cleaning things up. Run disutility, reboot in safe mode and restart. Reinstall OS from recovery and erase disk and do a clean reinstall. You'd think the last step would fix it if it were a software problem, it seems to be. But if it's hardware, why is it intermittent? Any help would be appreciated. And yeah, I was scratching my head over this, Dave, and little bleeding and stuff. Now, this is a... First off, I reflected upon something that's important to me because it's me. But I was having finder issues on my MacBook Pro recently, running 10.13.3 and it would repeatedly crash and put up a dialogue box saying it crashed and what I'd like to reopen the windows and then it would recycle in that. So I've seen this finder thing as well. I don't know if you have, Dave. Where the finder, okay, but I've seen it maybe once a month where the finder just gets totally confused. And just restarting the finder, solve the problem? No, no. You have to reboot the Mac. Even logging out and logging in, you'd think that would solve the problem. But I found in this case, a restart is necessary and I'll have to fix the problem. Because for him, restarting the finder fixes it, at least for a while. Yeah, but I do agree that erasing and reinstalling should fix any issue and I think that's where he left it. It's true. And he did that and it seems to have gone away. But before taking that step, I would have suggested that he runs, I suspect maybe data corruption. Well, he didn't. He says, yeah, he says erase disk and do a clean and reinstall didn't do it. Right, he says you'd think that last step would fix it if it were the software problem it seems to be, but if it's hardware, why is it intermittent? It wasn't clear to me if he took that step and kept happening. I'm not clear on that. He says he did that. Yeah. And then he was saying, Yeah, it's true. I'm with you on that. Yep. All right. And then he asked about the nature of hardware problems and well, you know. But to continue, I suspect what happened is that I think he may have had data corruption because the number of things that he mentioned that were not working right, would suggest to me that it was data corruption. Yeah. So before he did the reformat and all that, the one thing he did not do was run a utility, even something basic like this utility or Drive Genius, to see if there's any data corruption or running something that can report the smart parameters, which I know we agree that, you know, smart is not perfect, but tools such as Drive DX can do some what I'll call predictive failure analysis. They're like, yeah, you know, I see these numbers are increasing and that that's not good. So... Yeah. Well, this is, this would be an SSD, right? Well, the thing is, yeah. So actually, yeah. The full dialogue is not in the box here. My apologies. But he did get back to me and he did say, so this is what makes it even weirder. He's like, yeah, well, you know, the thing is I did run, so he does have Drive Genius and Drive DX. So that was in a follow-up, which again, I didn't put that in our box. No problem. I'll explain it to you. So he did run Drive DX. So it's an SSD, it's in a newer iMac and he ran Drive DX. And here's the weird part, though. This is where it goes off the rails, my friend. He ran Drive Genius. And it gave the same error that I got with Drive Genius with my rotational APFS drives. So this is where it goes, again, I'm gonna say off the rails, is that when he tried to run Drive Genius on that same drive, it reported, I think, this error 72, which turns out to be an IO error, which is pretty much useless. I mean, it's like, well... Yeah, but IO error could mean that there is a hardware problem with that drive. And that was my response to him, is that I think it sounds like it is an issue with either your SSD or the connection to the SSD and maybe the controller, or the controller in his machine. So I think the next step he said is that he's gonna do AppleCare or Genius Bar to determine that. But I'm really, after hearing all of the stuff that he said here, is he leaning towards a hardware issue? For the state of corruption? Yeah, you know, I would wipe the drive and start. I mean, if he says he's done the erase test. I mean, he did that already, though. Yeah. Well, he did that already and it sounds like the problems have... Yeah, that's right. Other than Drive Genius saying, oh yeah, I had this weird error. It's the hard drive. Yeah, if he's erased it. I mean, that's the test, right? If it's file system corruption, wiping the disk and doing a clean reinstall is gonna address that. So yeah, it's a problem with the SSD. Or like you said, the controller or the cable, any of those things, yep. Right, so I'm hoping... Alex in the chat room had an interesting thought kind of as we were going through this and it's worth throwing out there not necessarily for this problem, but as other people are going through different things. Alex says, you know, when he said that it wouldn't display lines containing certain characters that display fine in TextEdit, he's like, well, they both use different fonts, right? BB Edit uses one set of fonts, TextEdit uses another and it's entirely possible that those fonts have gotten corrupted. So checking those fonts and going into a font book and looking or having it do a check of all the fonts, that would be not be a bad thing. And if, you know, and Alex actually points out that it could still be that if he restored from a time machine backup, because if there was a corrupted font file, well, then that's, you know, that would come back. So it's, you know, font book, it's worth remembering. Yeah. Oh yeah, no, I've used it in the past. And yeah, sometimes, you know, you'll find duplicate fonts, which could cause problems. Yep. Well, and you can just use it to validate fonts. So it, you know, it'll go through and, and if you're really having a problem, first make a backup of all your fonts and then just restore the standard fonts in the file menu and font book, that'll get you back to ground zero. I mean, you'll, you'll miss all of your, your great stuff, but it'll rule that out. And I, and I've seen it, you know, I've seen fonts like totally crater a system. So there you go. Yeah, it just, with the variety of symptoms and apps that we're misbehaving. Yeah. Yeah, I just couldn't detect a common thread other than your data is messed up. Yeah. Well, fonts are a common thread. That's the thing is, you know, they are, right? I mean, they're system-wide. Oh, I like, I'm not necessarily sure that that's the solution here. Although it might be, but I, I like, you know, that's a good one to throw out there and just remember is you're troubleshooting these things that fonts are system-wide, you know? And I've seen them like crater a system. Oh. Yeah. So. Oh, you're right. And the thing is, yes, you can actually, yeah. So I'm looking right now, I haven't run it a while, but yeah, you can go into font book and highlight your fonts. And then say, I think validate. File validate. You'll go through them and say, um, yeah. You know, they're good or bad or again, duplicates I think is, is something that I've seen wreak havoc. You have multiple installations of a font. Yeah. Sometimes that confuses the OS. So. Hey, I wanted to, to mention, we were, but I was talking last show, I guess it was about that, that client that had, where I had both the husband and wife using their, the same iCloud account because the goal was to share photos. Well, two things about that. Number one, listener David wrote in and suggested leaving them with separate iCloud accounts and using Google photos to sync both of their libraries to Google photos. And he's totally right about that. In fact, I had had that conversation with them. The problem with Google photos, of course, is they don't show up in your photos library in the right way. You have to do all this syncing and everything. And while yes, you could look in Google photos in the app to see everything, they wanted it all in one place. So we got them there. There was one caveat though, when you are sharing an iPhone or an iCloud account, and that is that phone calls will ring on the other person's computer unless you go in and turn that off. Yeah, yeah. So that, I knew I was missing something, but if you go in to a settings phone and go to calls on other devices, that's where I had to go to manage where this would happen and not happen. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and Brian was saying use iCloud, read the terms and conditions. So we'll come back to that. Maybe you'll explain what you mean by, I'm assuming you mean Google's terms and conditions, but go ahead, John, because I have one thing. I merged all their photos and I want to talk a little bit about that, but. Oh, okay. No, I was just tossing out Flickr as a solution since last I checked, macOS and iOS do have some level of Flickr integration. Yes, it's true. Yeah, you got to pay for it, but yeah. Well, I'm on the I'm on the cheapskate plan and I'm happy, but yeah, you can get the pro. Yes, right, right, right. Yeah, Brian's saying to use a shared album. That's how you do this. Well, you can, but things aren't automatically put into the shared album, which is what they want. They really wanted to have one photo library and I get that like having a family photo library, everything is on one place. So they had had someone else work on this machine and or work on this problem for them. And so they gave me this, this, they had this drive that had once I started, I started looking at their house and I said, wait a minute, we're going to need, like there's going to be a lot of unsupervised time while these libraries all merged together. So I'm going to go ahead and take this drive home to my office. So I don't have to sit here and bill you for, you know, the hours and hours and hours while these things merge. And, and so I did, there were no less than seven I photo and or photos libraries on this drive. And so there were about half of them were I photo libraries, half were photos libraries. There were a lot of dupes, but no one thing that duplicated everything. And then there were two folders each with, you know, a hundred gigs of data of loose photos in them. And I had no idea how any of this came together, but power photos, man, was like saved the day and saved them a bunch of money because power photos will merge and it'll merge multiple libraries into one and it'll check for duplicates on the fly. Really, really awesome stuff. So I set up a separate user account. You're going to love this, John. I set up a separate user account on my Mac, started doing all this for them there and I logged that user account into their iCloud account just for photos. I turned everything else off. And that way, once I finished merging, I merged everything together into a separate library that wasn't their iCloud photo library, but I did have my computer download all their photos so that I could do the final merge here as well. And so I got it all together. I cleaned up this one library that was like merging everything that was on this disk that they gave me. And then the final step was, I merged that into their iCloud library. And the best part is, now that's on their computers and I haven't even gone and given them their driver or actually I haven't even given them a bill. Like the problem is solved. And because of iCloud, they just magically get the solution pushed to all their devices. Yeah. So I thought that was pretty good. So, you know, but power photos, man, that was the saving grace. Really, really great piece of software. It totally was stable through the whole thing. I mean, this thing ran for probably four days straight on my iMac in the office, just kind of, you know, doing various different crunching and all that stuff. Oh, I mean, well, I had to constantly, you know, it took like five minutes here, 10 minutes there of my time to go over and like, okay, it finished this step. Now the next thing is merge these together and compare and check for dupes. And, you know, so yeah, I was just running constantly, but it did a great job with it. So I'll put a link to power photos. I know we've talked about it a million times, but it was the first time that I'd really relied on it, you know, to like get the job done. I'm glad I've never had a need to use it. Yeah, well, it's great. It really, I highly recommend it. Yeah. Well, especially since, you know, I dove into the, you know, iCloud photo library, pond, I'm thrilled. It's awesome. Does everything, I would want. Well, that was the thing is I just needed to get them there. And it was like, you know, yeah. So yeah, yeah, hopefully they're happy. They're on vacation. I did send them a note saying, hey, I'm gonna do this iCloud merge, but if it starts messing with your devices because you're traveling or whatever, like let me know, but it shouldn't. So given how I have them all set up. Anyway, there you go. It's fun. Yes, as Brian Monroe says, dealing with people's digital clutter can simply take time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, you should extend the tip jar. Maybe get a tip. That's right. There you go. Giving such good advice. Yeah. There you go. It paid me well for my time. It's fine. All right. Should we go to Andrew here? What's the answer? Let's answer Andrew's question here. That's another one where, yeah, there's some backroom chatter that we had in this as well. You answer the question that I answered. Okay. You'll lead it off and I will bring up, I'll bring up the email where I replied as well because I think there are multiple answers to this question. None of them are right or wrong. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. So I'll ask, I'll pose Andrew's question, but I think you have the right answer. He says, I've got a 13-inch MacBook Air purchased in 2017, which was inadvertently upgraded to 10.13.x up from 10.12. I can downgrade and reinstall the older Mac OS after erasing the internal flash drive, but I have not been able to restore the recovery partition back to the lower recovery partition version of 10.12.x. Any guidance on how to roll it back is greatly appreciated. So my first thought, I have not done this, but my first thought was if you're going to, if you go and boot from something else, not the recovery partition, because recovery partition can't delete itself, but if you go boot from something else and truly repartition the drive, don't just erase the volume that's there, but if you repartition the drive, I thought that that would get rid of the recovery partition and then therefore when you're reinstalling Mac OS and putting 10.12 back on there, that that would do it. But sometimes that doesn't, or the... I'm pretty sure that's what Apple claims should happen. That's what I thought. Okay. If you reinstall the OS, especially on a erased drive, it should wipe out and upgrade the recovery, but it sounds like it didn't. Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like it didn't for him. That's right. Yeah. So you found another way, John. So short of wiping the drive, which he did, and that didn't work. So I found a few other things, Dave, that were pretty interesting. So I want to go into yours, but I do want to make sure, because it's possible that Andrew did not actually wipe the drive, right? When you're in disk utility, you can... And I mentioned this, but I don't want to gloss over it. When you're in disk utility, you can choose the drive or the volume inside the drive. Right? And if you choose the volume and erase that, then that does not touch the recovery partition that's there. It's just like the volume, except that it's hidden in disk utility, so you can't see it. But if you go up and choose the drive and choose to repartition it, take the partitions that are there off, put new ones out there, that should wipe the drive, especially if you repartition and just tell it one partition, that should do it. So my guess is he just erased the volume, not the drive. Right. Because there are different levels, and you can erase at different levels. Okay, so he may not have done a full erase. Okay, I'm with you on that. Yeah, the repartition is the key. But the question I had is what I think he was saying is that when he went into recovery, how did he determine that recovery was not the right recovery? Is that I assume that when he ran recovery and then he said reinstall macOS, it said, well, hey, you want me to install the latest version? I think that's what he was saying. Do you agree with me on that? No, he put 10.12 on there, but his recovery partition was still the one from 10.13. Right, well, I think that's just what I said. Oh, okay. Is how did he know recovery was the wrong version? And the only way I can tell that recovery is the wrong version is that when you try to say reinstall macOS, it says to install a version that's not the version. When you try to say that from within the recovery partition? Right. Yes, or just go to the Apple menu and choose about this Mac, and it'll show you on the recovery partition that you're running ICR and not CIRA. I found it doesn't do that. It won't sell you? No, it's kind of an obscure, the menu from what I could see didn't indicate the version of OS that I thought it was running. It's just like, oh, I'm running recovery or disutility or something like that. So I think, so I wanted to clarify, I think that's how he determined that the OS on the recovery was different from the OS that he hadn't installed, but a couple of other tips. Carbon copy cloner, which is my favorite, Dave, and I think is yours as well. Carbon copy cloner is really good about recovery partition backing up and restoring. Last I checked, and then it points it out. So one suggestion would be, hey, if you have an old backup made with carbon copy cloner, restore from that, and that may fix it. Yeah. Yeah, it won't create a recovery partition, but it will let you backup and restore them. That's right. Right, so if he has a backup where it backed up the recovery partition, it would restore it to the new drive. So if he still, if he has a fairly recent backup that he's confident that he's sure about, then use that. The other thing is then I did some Google Foo and surfing and the other thought, Dave, though it's kind of risky, but you could, I mean, I kind of like this one because it's kind of living on the edge here, but you could delete the recovery partition. And I did find an article that tells you how to do this, so it's actually, you got to dig into the terminal and basically say, okay, delete the recovery partition, which you should be able to say if you, you can run disutil from the terminal and see which one it is, and you can erase it and then merge it into, it doesn't take up a lot of space, but then I found an article that said both how to delete it and then how to merge it once you've deleted it into your main partition and then you could try to reinstall the OS. And that might create a new one, right? And then it'd be like, oh, there's no recovery partition. So a couple of additional vectors that you may want to explore here. Cool. All right, we've got time for a few, we actually have some quick tips here that are intentional quick tips, believe it or not, not just like croutons that you find. So the first is from Russell who says, in the last few episodes, you have been skirting around but you haven't said it. There is a command that when invoked properly in the finder empties the trash with no other confirmation or interaction. He says, it's what I use every time but it's a dangerous keyboard shortcut. So be careful and try not to get caught. That is command, option, shift, delete. Command, option, shift, delete. Deletes empties everything in the trash, doesn't ask you, doesn't pass go, whatever's there is gone. So there you go, be careful with great power, comes great responsibility, but you know, that's okay. No, it's four keys, so it's hard to assemble. Yeah, right, but you know, still be careful. All right, so that's the first of the quick tips. The second is from Patrick who says that you can modify the home screen layout of your iPhone or your iPad with Apple Configurator 2. And it's great, actually. I took a screenshot of this. It's, you see all of your different screens at once. You can dig into folders and you can move things around very quickly, which is the key, and then you just hit apply and it pushes the changes over to your phone. It's action, if you launch Apple Configurator 2, it's in actions, modify, home screen layout. So this is really cool because that's often a pain in the neck. So there you go. Oh yeah, I think we mentioned that in the past, but yeah, so Apple Configurator 2 gives back what iTunes took away. In a better way, I think too, because iTunes would do it on the fly. So this, you do everything and then you hit apply and you're done, so thank you, Patrick. Plus the Configurator does a ton of additional cool stuff. Well, there's that, yeah, we're gonna talk about. Right, but there you go. And then David links us to a quick tip at how to geek that shows how to move multiple apps at once. And the way it works is you get your home screen into jiggly, jiggly mode, you hold down until it starts doing that. And then you tap and drag one icon to start it moving around the screen. To add another app, you use a different finger and tap its icon while you're holding down the first and boom, they'll start to stack together. And we've talked about this before, but every time somebody brings it up, I'm just blown away because I forget about it for some reason. I don't know why, but there you go. So yeah, you just get it into jiggly mode, start moving one app and before you let that go, just use another finger to tap on other apps and they'll all pile on and then you can drag them all together. So two different ways to, yeah, I thought so. Pretty good, right? That's what I got, John. And really, I think that's gonna bring us to the outro today. Wrap it up. It's time. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. Alex, wait, wait, wait. There might be a bonus quick tip here. Alex says, did you know that with the magic mouse, you can move an item and with another finger you can swipe? I had no idea. Wow. And he says that way you're dragging and dropping. Man, that's pretty cool. Well, you had no idea, Dave, but I'm gonna give you an idea. All right. And that's, if you have a question or comment or tip or cookies or brownies or snacks. Croutons. You should send them or... You are fixated on those croutons. I'm obsessed. If you're obsessed with croutons, you should send an email to feedback. at mackeekab.com. I think you said feedback at mackeekab.com. You are absolutely correct in that I'm gonna send you some croutons to feedback at mackeekab. No, I think if you're gonna send croutons, you send those to feedback at mackeekab.com. I'm just saying. There you go. You can also, as I mentioned before, premium members can email us at premium at mackeekab.com. We do have a phone number. In fact, we've got quite a few voicemails that I think we're gonna be including at least some of them in the next episode. You can call us at 224-888-Geek, which John is? Four, three, three, five? Yeah, and do you see the commas when I, every week when I say which John is? Cause I do. I see them in front of me. It's beautiful, in fact. What are you talking about? Well, grammatically, you know, that's all. And you can also find us on Facebook. Go to mackeekab.com slash Facebook. That'll bring you there. And it's a beautiful thing. It's just what I like. We like beautiful things. And lastly, you haven't mentioned this for a while, but hey, you know, go to iTunes. Look us up. Oh, actually you don't have to. Go to mackeekab.com slash iTunes. That'll bring you to where you can review us. Yeah. Yeah. Reviews are great. Reviews are great. Shake your fist, shower us with praise or something in between. That's right. All right. Well, I want to thank, of course, all of you for listening, all of you for contributing, all the folks in the chat room for helping us out during the show. And I want to thank Cashfly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth. Of course, I want to thank all of our sponsors. As we said in this episode, we have Smile at textexpander.com slash podcast. We have Barebones Software at barebones.com. We have Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com. We've got Roboform at roboform.com. Two new ones coming up in the next episode. Well, I think that's it, John. Do you have any advice to give them? I think I do. Yeah, it's swirling in the back of my mind here. But I think the thing is especially with all this terrible weather that we're having in the Northeast and throughout the country here, you want to make sure you stay home. You're safe. Yeah. Stay safe. And don't get caught. May God bless you.