 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 724, back to school edition for Monday, August 27th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show that takes your questions. We take your cool stuff found. We take your tips. We take your rants. We take your fish shakes. We mix it all together into something where we can each learn, yes, at least five new things each and every time we get together. That's the goal. That's the idea. That's what we do. That's how it is. Sponsors for this episode include LinkedIn Jobs or at linkedin.com.mgg, you get 50 bucks off towards your first job post, maxsales.com, the other world computing folks and their new Thunderbolt 3 10G Ethernet adapter and Jamf Now. You can sign up at jamf.com.mgg and get your first three devices free for life. We'll talk more about each of them shortly here. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How are you today, Mr. John F. Braun? Fantastic. And like I mentioned, Dave, as we discussed in pre-show, it's back to school week. Now we get the notice because they park a big old yellow school bus on our green and say, hey, look out for this thing and don't run over the little people that come out of it. Right. It's pretty much what they're telling people. And even today, it was chaos. I mean, there were kids walking everywhere. It was just crazy. So watch out, people. It makes me sad though, John. I just dropped my daughter off at college for the first time. Well, it makes me sad because it probably lightened your wallet a bit, right? Yeah, that happened about a month and a half ago. But yes, yeah. But yeah, I miss her. It sucks. I mean, it's great. It's like all of those things simultaneously. So it's just how it goes. But it's not easy. And yet it is easy. It's like it's where she should be. It's good. It's just, you know, we have a we have a Skyler sized hole in the house now. So it's like it's missing. Yeah, it sucks. But we're here to do this. Yeah, go ahead. We are in this day and age where communicating with the wee ones to say hi or see how they're doing. It's so much easier than it was like 20 years ago when we were going to school. It's totally true. Yeah, of course. Can you imagine what it would have been like now? You know, kids ask you, give us a minute on this, folks here. You know, every now and then we'd like to have a moment. Can you imagine what it would be like? And thank you, folks. What would it be like to go to college and have a cell phone, John? I mean, it would change everything like that. That whole, hey, what is everybody doing tonight? Like that whole thing of coordinating plans with people. Like that was impossible. I mean, we had to do it the old fashioned way, like talking to people. Yeah, but you couldn't face it was like, yeah, but that was it. You had to go like hunt around and find people. You couldn't text like once somebody left their dorm room, it was like, where are they? I don't know. They might be in that party or this party or, you know, watching that movie or whatever. It's like you had to just find them. They did. Well, we did have the usual watering hole. It's like, oh, well, everybody's probably sure starting off there. So let's go there and see what happens. Right. That was our strategy. You had your right. You know, that's right. You had your starting points. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. All right. Now we'll get dynamic and crazy. But speaking of dynamic and crazy, we have some crazy question. Well, no, they're not crazy. They're not crazy, but Randy asked. He sent in a note and he actually sent a screenshot along with it to sort of describe what he was seeing. And what was happening is it was a screenshot from mail and the fonts, the spacing between the font, the letters was all screwed up, right? And so that's that's the background. And that's really enough to know what to describe it. He says, and I've had this problem on and off for years. Usually it's on spam emails, so I never really cared about it. And he says, I think I've also seen it on websites from time to time. But I can't say for sure. He says, today it happened with this email and I needed to know the details of it. I've attached it below. He says, I did all my usually usual Google Foo. Thankfully, he says all the text is actually there. So a short term workaround is to highlight the text, you know, copy and paste it into like text editor, BB editor, whatever. And and then he could see it. So the text was fine. It was just displaying wrong. So that, of course, makes me think, OK, damaged font, right? Because it is especially if it happens in Safari, too, right? That that because mail uses them wide, right? And mail uses WebKit to display HTML emails. And WebKit, of course, is the engine at the core of displaying web pages for Safari, too. So it's like, OK, all right. And they all rely, like you said, John, system wide fonts. So going to font book in the applications folder, if you highlight all the fonts and then go to file the file menu and choose validate fonts, that should fix that should at least tell you what's going on. And sure enough, Randy kind of headed down that path and then kind of had to sniff around in a couple of different ways. But he found a damaged copy of Helvetica in his user library fonts folder. So not that it was because it's in your user folder. It takes precedence over the system one. Boom. There's the problem. He removed that problem solved. So. Yeah. And looking at his and looking at the, you know, the copy here, it's interesting because certain letters were damaged, like H. It wouldn't show H's. Right. What? But the other thing I've noticed. So one font book is your pal. Now, you should never have to use it. But the thing is you could have either a damaged font, as you pointed out, you could have duplicate fonts like an app could have installed a copy or a different version. Now, for the most part, I think most fonts are true type, but they could be postscript or other representations. And sometimes you may have multiples and font book does, as you pointed out, does a pretty good job. It has a fix it up command that should identify and take care of those. You may have to, and I think our friend actually had to do this. You may have a Randy actually, I think, had to dig in manually to see the problem. And that, yeah, it's an app from ages ago installed a bad copy of a font and he suffered. Yeah, he suffered the consequences. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty great. I mean, you know, but you're right. Font book is your friend. It can do quite a few things. You can disable fonts, turn them on and off. And it will it will really kind of give you a picture and let you dig in and see what's going on with your font. So whenever you're having issues like that, take a look. And of course, if you're like us, you'll probably want it now. Go and run front book anyway, just to see what it finds and maybe, you know, clean things up a little bit proactively, because, you know, if it ain't broke, fix it till it is. Oh, no, no, no. No, you're right. And actually, I'm looking here like in my one of my folders. So this is my user folder. But in library, there's both a fonts, which is empty. So I guess I just have a system font. But then there's a folder called font collections, which kind of worries me now. It's like, well, what's that? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. What problem is that going to cause? Yeah, what problem is that going to cause? Yeah, exactly. All right. Listener Brian writes in and it's man, it seems like sorting photos and all that's a theme now. He says, do you know what data photos and before it I photo use to sort photos when you're importing them? Says, I have 4,000 slides that I had scanned by an outside source. And the created date is, of course, the same on all of these. He says, I have a better finder rename, which is an app. And we talked about it in the last show. Says, and I want to batch convert these files to the appropriate month years that the slides slash photos were taken. I don't know if it is done by file name, file created date or the exit data. Do you? So, yeah, we talked a little bit about this in a previous show and did some research as well. Photos will use the exit date if that's there. If it's not there, then it will use the file creation date. I do not think that it will use the anything about the file name as a hint towards the date. It might, but I would not rely on that. I would use a better finder rename and set the exit date on these. That would be the best way. And, you know, if you want to be doubly safe, set the exit date and the created date and even the modified date to exactly the same thing. And then that way, you're definitely covered. It's going to come and it's going to figure it out. So, yeah, it's crazy, though, right? I mean, well, it is. And, you know, I've actually had the issue with older photos where you may not have necessarily had a camera that put the proper or even put the data in there at all, any XIF, which now, you know, any modern phone or camera should populate that data with the correct stuff, which all of the major photo programs should acknowledge. Should acknowledge. Yeah, right. But this is with it being scanned. There's nothing, you know, there's no data. He has to create it. It's not going to. There's no place. And then we see the nightmare, which is, oh, OK. Well, I'll use the file system. And it's like, well, like, I guess that's better than nothing. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, it's 1970, right? Yeah, right. Yeah. It's the UNIX Epic Time. Kids, you can ask your parents about that. Actually, no, it's so the there is something called the UNIX Epic Time, Epoch. And it is the first time. I think it's January 1st, 1970, right? Yeah, Thursday, January 1st, 1970. Is the beginning of time for all UNIX systems and everything is counted in seconds after that? Truly, it's just how it is. They had to pick a start time and that's it. The original Mac was dated in 1984, like if you blew away the clock or whatever, it would go back to 84. But but UNIX machines all just count seconds from January 1st, 1970. And that's just how it works. So we'll we'll put a we'll put a link in the show notes if anybody wants to dig deeper into that. Some interesting trivia as to why is it 1970? Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Either you're having a flashback or or both. Or your battery died while we're on the subject. Yeah, exactly. While we're on the subject of all of this, Adam writes in with a cool stuff found that I actually had slotted for later in the episode, but but the time is right. He says, while not as simple as a better find or rename, he says, I have found a free method for renaming files using their exit data. So this is if you have the exit data, but you want the the date of the files to match the exit data. You can you can do this or I guess in this case, he's renaming the files to match the date that's baked in by the by the camera. And it's called exit tool. E X I F T O O L by Phil Harvey. And we'll put a link in the show notes. He says it's a command line tool that allows all sorts of info gathering and manipulating of exit data. Once installed, a one line command can rename an entire folder of files to date and time. There's plenty of instruction on the site. And he says I even found a few tutorials on YouTube. We mentioned this. This is a technically a cool stuff found reprise. But it was four years ago. So I think it's safe to call it just cool stuff found now. So yeah, there you go. Pretty good, right? I have I have another one. I realized because I got I got a couple. But anyways, now I just looked on my phone and I actually have like at least two things that have the word E X I F in it. So oh, yeah, this is no of the reason. Just run the app store in either platform and type in the X I F and you should get a pile of things. Yeah. So this one's not in the app store and it is for the Mac, right? Because it's a command line tool. So just just heads up. Yeah. Oh, oh, this is like the core of like other things. Correct. That's right. Yep. And then while we're at it, because here we are. Ian also cool stuff found. But here it is. He says a recent episode discussed photo sorting by Exif date. He says, I know you talked about Pathfinder. He says, I do want to say how absolutely brilliant past Pathfinder is. Version eight is out now and does pretty much everything much better than the finder. He says, however, may I recommend Neo finder originally CD finder. He says, this is a dedicated media finder app. It will sort by amongst other things. Exif date, which is what we were asked about in the previous episode. It says you can click on the triangle at the bottom of their main window to see all sorts of sorting options. He says, I'm thinking of using it as my primary photo cataloging app. Having moved from aperture to Lightroom and a sparing of the subscription model, which is a waste of money for the majority of people who only use a photo program occasionally. He says, for Neo finder, the developer is extremely responsive and it'll smart folders and all sorts of stuff. So thank you for that, Ian. That's that's great. One really kind of gets us down that path. So good stuff. And yeah, I'm calling audibles left and right here, John, with the agenda. But, you know, welcome to the Mac Geek app, right? That's how it goes. And I'm going to help you learn an additional thing here. So remember we were talking about using the finder to find things using a certain search attribute? Yes. Well, I was just looking here and I thought I remind people that at least on my system than what I'm sitting in front of, Dave, if I look at the other search attributes, there are two that have the word exif in them. Oh, interesting. And actually, so that, I mean, that in itself isn't terribly useful because it says I can either find the exif gps version, who cares? Or the exif version. But the thing is, if you look in the finder find other category, you will see if you have any photo programs, photo related things like the shutter. I noticed this last time I looked at the list. I was like, oh, wow, I can search on that. Cool. So depending on the software you have installed, you can search for photos either on the exif data, but not so much. Or attributes of the photo that are important to you. So. Cool. Huh? Very cool. Cool. All right. You know what I want to do, John, is I want to talk about our first sponsor, which is Other World Computing at MacSales.com. These folks, we say it all the time and it's because it's true. They're the first place that John and I go when we're looking for, you know, stuff to enhance or add to our Macs. Really? Right? Because, you know, you need a drive. Yeah. A drive enclosure. You need, you know. A drive. A drive. Yeah. You need RAM. You need just also any sort of accessory. For example, they've got their Thunderbolt 3 10G Ethernet adapter now that you can just plug it into your Thunderbolt 3 capable USB-C port, of course. And and then you can get up to, you know, 10 gig Ethernet capability right there. It's bus powered, easy set up, energy efficient, low noise, you know, all of that good stuff. And of course, because they're OWC, it works with previous gen Ethernet networks, too. You can connect any wired network to its RJ45 port. Works with, you know, basically, well, it says 10.13.4 and later. And even works with Windows 10. So there you go. You got to check this out. Go to macsales.com, the other world computing folks, thanks to other world computing for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Rich wrote in and he we've been sort of going back and forth, actually. And Rich is trying to he's got a Linksys Vellop network and trying to sort out why his Wi-Fi speeds are the way they are. And he's got a gigabit Ethernet connection, right? OK, hardwired. And then he has and then this is a mesh system. Correct. Well, one of them. Yeah, and it's a decent one, you know, the Linksys. But but as with most mesh systems, you know, the Wi-Fi is two by two radios in there, which means it's two radios per channel. And that's two streams per channel, perhaps two antennas per channel. Just like your iPhone is just like most laptops are your IMAX and your MacBook Pros have three antennas in them so that they can go in theory, 50 percent faster, depending on everything else. And so he's been on the phone back and forth with Linksys tech support because Linksys makes the well, I mean, it's Linksys, which is now Belkin, which is now who just acquired. Oh, not again. Yeah. Yeah. But whatever. Stop buying each other, you know, it's going on here. Yeah. But, you know, he he wound up on the phone with with Linksys. And when you have a two by two radio, the maximum speed of each of those radios is with 802.11 AC is 433 megahertz, right? That's the maximum speed. Wait, wait, I'm sorry. You just said megahertz. Mega bits per second. Thank you, John. No, you're right. Yeah, I'm here for you, man. I've got. I appreciate it. All right. So an 802.11 AC single radio stream is 433. Correct. OK, because I was digging in my head for that, too. So your expectation is that in theory, the maximum speed is that times the number of radios, the number of streams, the number of antennas, right? So on a two, two by two means you've got two to send with and two to receive with. So fine. OK, great. That's your upstream, your downstream. So in theory, we're looking at 866 megabits per second, right? With an iPhone or, you know, anything that they'll do two by two, which is what his network is. Or about, I would say, you know, off the cuff, 80 megabytes a second, maybe. Well, theoretical maximum, right? Correct. So the first thing you do is you cut that in half because of the way all this works, right? You're never going to you're not going to actually ever see the theoretical maximum. You're going to get half that. That's how it's always been with Wi-Fi. That's how it always will be. Really? Yeah. That's now your actual maximum, right? And then add to that distance interference, you know, whatever signal quality orientation of the phone, he's getting when he does his speed test somewhere in the 300, 350, maybe sometimes 400 megabit per second speeds. So he had called Linksys about this, which is about right. That's what you're going to get. That's to be expected. I mean, part of it is what frequency is he on, hopefully five or not? Well, he's I mean, there's all these factors. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, because 802.11 AC only operates at the five gigahertz range. So he's definitely on five gigahertz, right? Yep. But again, you know, interference, orientation, whatever, you know, impacts this and in his scenario, he's able to get faster speeds on the upstream than he is on the downstream. But you know, when he wires in, he's able to get 900 plus. And so he talked to Linksys and I feel like they, perhaps, I don't think it was intentional. In fact, I don't know that they even meant to communicate this, but what they communicated to him and what he took away from the conversation was you should get on Wi-Fi, you should get speeds that are half of what you get on wired. And while that's true in his scenario, that is not a universal truth, right? Your Wi-Fi speed is limited by your Wi-Fi and has nothing to do with your WAN speeds when you separate it out. Now, when you... Right. Assuming every device, and we have seen this in the past, but just to bring this up this point here, is if you're a diagnosing a problem like this, you could have a device that doesn't have a gigabit port. And I've run into this, like certain older firewall products or network protection products. It's like, hey, let's throw 100 megabit, and it's like, dude, are you serious? So that could be a limiting factor. But let's say... It's not in this case. Let's say that that is the limiting factor, right? Let's say that he's got something that limits his overall WAN speed, WAN meeting his connection to the Internet wide area network. Let's say he's got something there that limits it to 100 megabits per second. He's still going to get 100 megabit per second wirelessly from his phone because his phone is capable of doing more. It's the whole weak link in the chain concept. And he's got gigabit Internet. His Wi-Fi is the weak link in the chain, and that is true for all of us. When you don't have gigabit Ethernet, your Wi-Fi might be a lot faster, capable of going a lot faster than your Internet speeds. And this is why testing your network with SpeedTest is a potentially flawed way to go. It is super easy, right, because you can launch the SpeedTest app on your phone. You can bring up speedtest.net or whatever. I mean, there's several different websites you can bring up. But when you're testing your Wi-Fi speeds to a remote server, you are at the mercy of not just what's going on with your Wi-Fi, but what's going on with your Internet connection and everything in between you and whatever remote server is. So if you really want to test your local network speeds, the best thing to do is to use a local network test where the SpeedTest never leaves your local network. And that way, you can isolate. And of course, that's not really the easiest thing to do, to be perfectly honest. There's a piece of software called iPerf that you can run at the command line. And it's fine. I mean, it works. I use it all the time. But you have to go through the process of perhaps installing Homebrew or something. Thankfully, we do have an article that will teach you how to use iPerf. And really, it's quite straightforward. So I'll put that link in the show notes. But be aware of, again, really, I think the concept to take away from this discussion is look for the weak link in the chain and be aware of what that likely is. And with him, it's not his Internet connection. With most of us, it is our Internet connection speed. That will be slower than our Wi-Fi. Even me on a gigabit connection, yes, my downstream speed is gigabit. That's faster than my Wi-Fi. My upstream speed, 40 megabits a second. So my Wi-Fi can go way faster than that. But I will never see it if I do a speed test. So just bear in mind. In a nutshell, I'd be shocked if I saw my advertised speeds for my ISP come up during my speed tests when I'm doing it on Wi-Fi. Because I know there's all, as we mentioned, there's all sorts of factors, signal strength and interference and all that stuff here. You should be surprised if your wireless speed anywhere approaches your actual network, internal network speed. Above a certain point. I mean, if you have Wi-Fi speeds, if your downstream is 200 megabits a second or less, I would say you should always be able to see that on your Wi-Fi. But your upstream, I mean, you should always be able to soak that too, right? Again, 200 megabits a second or less, you should always be able to see that. And if your Wi-Fi doesn't do 200, then you might want to take a look at stuff. But if your WAN speeds are above 200, yeah, it's, you know, and honestly, one of the weak links in the chain can be the speed test servers themselves. Some of them won't go to a thousand. I've had, you know, I've done speed tests where it's like 400 megabits a second or whatever. Well, they provision like everybody else sometimes. Right. Yeah, right. They have to. Yeah. They got to manage bandwidth somehow. So, I guess the takeaway is, you know, try to identify the segments of your network where you think there's a performance problem. Is it your switch? Could be. Is it your cable modem? Or wireless access point? Yep. And, or is it your iPhone, right? Because you could have, you could have a router that's 4x4, right? Which is totally capable, like the, the Synology router has a 4x4 radio. Oh, it does. Yeah. The plume, right? We've talked about the plume Wi-Fi setup, the mesh system. They have one of the three radios in the Superpods is a 4x4 radio, and it will use that for front hall. I noticed it actually with Skye's MacBook Pro, my daughter's MacBook Pro. She was getting like killer speeds, and I'm like, whoa, what's going on? And then I realized, oh, it's a 3x3 radio in there. Plume's system was smart enough to say that has 3x3. It should be on the 4x4 radio. And she was truly getting, you know, I, she was getting 700 megabits per second downstream, you know, from an internet connection. It was like, oh, yeah. Right? Of course. You know, sometimes you just got to, you got to kick back and say, do I really need all the speed? Can't I just take a little time to just enjoy life and then, well, and that's, I don't usually pace. That's the thing. I mean, above a certain point, you're going to be fine. And I would say really above 100 megabits a second, you're probably not going to run into any problems that negatively impact your ability to just do stuff on your, on your phone. I mean, I looked the other day. So I'm Netflixing like many of us do. Sure. The thing is, dude, Netflix takes, if you hit the info button, depending on your platform, I looked at it. It's three megabits a second. Well, unless you're streaming 4k and then it's 25. Oh, okay. All right. I'm, I'm obviously streaming HD. Right. Right, right, right. 4k. Yeah. But even then, that, that's within the cap of most people's internet service, I would think, under the cap. Correct. Yeah. Even 25. Yeah. That's right. Really 25? Okay. That's what it takes to do 4k. Yeah. So you're doing 4k? No. I'm not. I'm just, I'm just aware of that. Oh, you could. Yeah. Well, I don't have a 4k TV. I have devices that would support 4k as, as you do. I think it's just my TV is not one of them. So yeah. All right. All right. Speaking of videos, listener Adam wrote in. And he said, I have a YouTube video that a friend and I made and we would like to transcribe it for closed captioning, among other things. And he says, I figured I could use voice typing on my iPhone and an app like notes, cleaning it up after I played it through a decent set of speakers from my Mac with the iPhone near one speaker, but it recognized less than one word in 20, even pausing playback every few seconds to allow for ketchup. I then went, wanted to try the Mac itself for my iPhone. I think that's the way to do it, because it's a good way to use the Mac. But it's just, it's just not as quick, because it's a way for people to understand what is going on. So it's just a way for people to understand what is going on, what is going on. And he says, I don't have a decent audio input. And he tried it. He said, you know, he slowed it down. He went through all sorts of things. He says, I'd rather not send it off to a transcription service. And I can't type that fast. Can you recommend a method using any possible pair of answer for you for certain. But with our small business show podcast, I'm going to take a little detour here. We've been wanting to do transcriptions of our episodes, and we've been trying all these different services, right? And so similar thing. And just like we do with MackieGab, we publish our audio feed, and then we also take the audio and publish that to YouTube. And some folks, some of you folks, if you find the MackieGab podcast channel on YouTube, you can listen to our episodes there. And some folks do, and they support the chapters and all that great stuff, right? It's there. So with the small business show, we do exactly the same thing. We publish our normal feed with chapters, and then we publish to YouTube, but also with chapters and all that stuff. And we've been trying different transcription services, easy for me to say. Okay. As I read Adam's question here, the answer for Adam immediately popped into my head. And for some reason, it did not pop into my head for the last six months when Shannon Jean and I have been messing around with transcription services. Yeah. And it's my initial thought, and I just can't believe this didn't come up. It's amazing. You approach a problem from different ways, and your brain pulls up different information instantly. I was like, well, dude, YouTube will do that for you. And then it hit me. Oh, yeah, YouTube does do that for you. And it's true. If you go into your YouTube content manager, you have to use the old one. The new beta one doesn't have the ability to see and manage the transcription stuff, but it'll be there on the web. You can definitely see it on your videos. You have the little three dots, and there's the view transcription. It's automatic. YouTube does it all the time. They do it for every video. But if you go into your content manager, you go to subtitles slash CC section of your video, you'll see there where you can choose the transcribe and auto sync feature. You can have it retranscribe things or you can download like a subtitles version of your thing or in any other text format that you want. It's all right there. You're good to go. So is it doing it in real time? No, it does it when... Or does it do it when you upload the video? Correct. Okay. Yeah, it does it when you upload. So YouTube, and I assume others, happen to have a feature that transcribes the audio to text when you upload, which that's a great idea. I know. I'm sure it doesn't always get it right. No, but you can correct it too. You can like go through and... So you can look at the log and then you actually point it out here. Yes, that it's output in a standard format if you... Many standard formats. In fact, you can pick... Too many, right? No, it's great. It's crazy, man. So I don't know why it never hit me. And so I immediately, of course, texted Shannon and I'm like, Hey man, here's this thing. He's like, That's brilliant. I had no idea. I wish I could say the same thing. I did have an idea. It just never percolated. But that's how it goes. All right. I want to talk about our second sponsor, John, which is LinkedIn jobs, LinkedIn talent solutions. If you need to hire somebody like that can, the right hire can make a huge impact on your business. And that's why it's really important to find the right person. But the trick is finding someone and oftentimes the right people aren't necessarily looking for a job right now. But when the right job shows up, they might just take it. And where are you going to find people that are not looking for jobs, but are have listed their qualifications for you to sort by and search by and even pitch to where is that LinkedIn? Think about it. Like 70% of the US workforce is already there. And LinkedIn jobs uses that to match people to your role based on more of who they are, their skills, their interests, even how open they are to hear new opportunities. LinkedIn jobs gets your jobs seen by the right people. And I have used this. It is fantastic. And you can get a $50 off your first job post. And that may be enough to get you the person that you're looking for, right? It's a good deal. So check it out. Go to LinkedIn.com slash MGG and get $50 off your first job post. Again, LinkedIn.com slash MGG to get $50 off your first job post. Say it with me. LinkedIn.com slash MGG. That's right. Terms and conditions apply. It really is. It's great. It works. Trust me on this. Our thanks to LinkedIn for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. You all right there? Yeah. No, I just, I liked your spin on LinkedIn. We're all on LinkedIn, or we should be. All on LinkedIn. Find out what's happening. Exactly, man. Yeah. I get the alerts. It's like, Hey, you know, your friend just got a promotion. It's like, Hey, your friend got a job. Yeah. Like you said. Yeah. It's great. That's how you do it. Yeah. All right. Moving on to Damien here. We've got some tips and maybe a couple of questions and stuff because it's what we do. So Damien said, while manually sorting some email on my iPhone, I accidentally tapped on the double arrows for some grouped emails. iOS mail then flipped the arrows to point down and showed me the individual emails under the group organized by date. He says, I don't know how long this feature was there. He says, but I never noticed it before and I find it hugely useful. If there wasn't anything that epitomized the quick tip, that's this. The thing that might seem obvious to you, might not seem obvious to you, but that's the point. It's not necessarily obvious to everyone. So if you didn't know this, great tip. Thank you, Damien, for sharing that with us. I love quick tips like that. Don't you? I thought you would. Jan wrote in and sort of buried a quick tip in a question, but he reminds us. He says, my mid-2011 21-inch iMac gave up sometime before the summer. He says, an external hard drive can still boot it, but that's about it. He says, what I'd like to use the iMac as a monitor for my mini. And he says, do you think that target display mode would work? And the answer is yes. You can take an iMac and turn it into a monitor. You connect your mini display port in the opposite direction. You make sure that the machine that is going to drive things is logged into a user account on itself. Your iMac doesn't necessarily need to be in any state other than on. And then the magic is control, sorry, command F2. And command F2 will make what's called target display mode. That's it. It works. And it turns it into a relatively expensive display. But if that's what you need it for and or it won't do anything else, then there you go. So the port of the machine that wants to talk to it is display port? Yeah. Yeah, you would run. And then the port on the Mac, once you put it in target display mode is also display port. So is it display? So the hardware that you would need to connect them, I just want to be clear on that. No, this is great. Yeah, it's a mini display port. It's not display port. It's the mini display port cable, the little one. Yep. And you just connect it, connect two machines together and you're good to go. And I suppose for a Thunderbolt based iMac, you can do that too. So yeah. Nice. Yeah. So target display mode. Again, just one of those things to remind us of because it's always there. We have been talking a lot about SSDs and we talked about the whole concept of garbage collection, which is where a cell on the SSD is marked as available. But before something else can write to it, it needs to be wiped out, which takes an extra cycle in the process. And that can slow things down. So that's why when you change a file or whatever, it writes to an already empty spot, etc., etc. Well, Bob wrote a listener, Bob wrote what we call the SSD egg carton analogy, John. And it really like it helps explain how this works. Now, what's really cool is that he posted this analogy to Apple's discussion forums and I thought, okay, cool. I'll just read it from the discussion forums while we're doing the show. I'm now getting a gorgeous message that says, we'll be back. We're busy updating the Apple support communities and we'll jump back shortly. What are they releasing a new product? Uh-oh. No, it's not the store. It's the communities that are the discussion. It's actually a bad message. Yeah. So I'm not actually, I feel like I could probably get pretty close. I'll give you the broad strokes and I will encourage you. I got the same message. We'll be back. We're busy. Oh, boy. Yeah. They're probably shutting it down as we speak. That's right. So you may never see it. So Bob's analogy is this. If you have, think about the SSD as having boxes of like multiple egg cartons and the cells are inside each egg carton. So there's 12 cells inside each block and 12 eggs inside the carton. If you have something that's on say block 22 and that's marked as empty, it can't free up 22 until 13 through 24 are also able to be cleaned up, right? Because it has to kill the block all at the same time, not individual cells in the block. So the system, when it does its garbage collection, either waits until 13 through 24 are marked that way or it will say, you know what? Things are inefficient here. And so it will take 13, 14, 19 and 20 and move those to another block marking those cells as free. Now it can clean out that egg carton. So this is, I know, it's crazy. This is how it, but this is how it works. Oh no, it's not crazy. I like the analogy. Hopefully that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. No, and I think it does, but to me, the larger question is this threshold. Right. So Bob makes an excellent point. The thing is, when do you get to the point where the drive has not yet caught up? You see what I'm driving at here? When there's not enough free space. Has the drive gotten to the point where it's trimmed all the cells that can be trimmed? And the bad news is if it hasn't, then you get inefficiencies. Right. If it has, then everything's swimming and you get optimum right speeds. No, I agree with what he's saying. It says, how do you determine what this figure is? And I don't know if there's necessarily a tool available to us, mere mortals, that can tell you, oh, here's the, do you know about this? I mean, I don't. Yeah, I see what you're asking though. Like how do you know? Could you have a tool saying X percentage of your supposedly available cells are actually available? So there's some in this state, which is like pre-trim, and then there's some in this state, which is like post-trim, which is what you want on yourself to be. We have to not use the word trim for that, because I'm going to explain in a minute what trim is. Go. No. And so trim is... Well, I get what trim is, but yes, I go. Yeah, using, yeah, cleanup, right, is pre-garbage collection, post-garbage collection. That's the right term. Trim is just a protocol, according to Bob here, that the file system can use to tell the SSD that you just deleted a file, and that the file's data blocks are now free to be moved to the garbage collection queue. But trim is... So whenever you would like to take care of this... Yes, exactly. Please do, but there's no, as far as I know, there's no timetable for this. It's like whenever the drives thinks it should, right? Correct. Trim is just the file system saying, you may free this up when you want. Not do it now. So it is helpful, because otherwise the SSD may not know that this is freed up, you know, because it's got data in it, and it might not... It can't know what the file system knows unless the file system tells it things, and that's what trim lets it do. So yeah. Right. So I'm wondering if our drive expert listeners, and we know you're out there because you make tools that do all sorts of cool things. Somebody has to have a tool that can tell you this. Now it may mop on your drive, which would be bad. Sure. Right. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it'd be nice to see, oh, you have X percent really clean cells that I can write to, and life is good, or your drive is totally clogged up, and it's a piece of junk, and... Yeah, almost like the SSD equivalent of defragment, or a fragmentation identifier. It's the wrong term, but similar concept. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's like, you know, what state is your drive in to receive useful information? Right. Right? It's either clogged or... Not clogged. Yeah. Interesting. All right. We talked about, yeah, please do. The feedback at MackieGab.com is where we want to hear from you. Hold on. My audio is bad here. I thought you said feedback at MackieGab.com. Yeah. No, let me get that right again. It's feedback at MackieGab.com, and that's where you're going to tell us all about what you might know that we can help everybody else with. We have been talking about AppleCare, and now, of course, it's AppleCare Plus, and listener David has a very interesting perspective. He says, I take a whole home look at this versus a per device look at AppleCare, and he says, what makes sense for, say, a $2,500 MacBook Pro alone may seem fine, but add to that the five iPhones, the i5 iPhones, three iPads, and various other Apple devices adds hundreds or thousands to the cost of the hardware, and then add in all the other tech almost all homes have today, such as routers, NAS devices, switches, mesh TVs, et cetera, and a whole home literally has thousands of dollars of tech that one could say needs some sort of insurance above the warranty or even AppleCare. He says, so I talked to my insurance agent, and she recommended that I take a rider policy out for $15,000 at $65 a year with a $50 deductible per incident. He says, this covers all my tech, so I pretty much do this versus any sort of AppleCare. Very smart, David, and definitely worth calling your homeowners or your renters insurance and having this conversation with them, because you can definitely get policies that cover things like your phone when you're out of the house. For example, I have, and I don't, again, this is one of those mental disconnects. I've never thought to do this for my tech. I've done it for some business-owned tech, never done it for a personal-owned tech, but I've done it for my drums. All my musical instruments are covered with a $0 deductible per incident because it was just economical to do it that way, and they are covered even when I am out of the home and they are covered when I am out of the home working and being paid to play a gig. All my gear is covered. I mean, it would be a shame if I damaged or had something stolen, but at least financially, I wouldn't take a hit on any of that. That's real smart, man. I like that. Pretty good. If anybody has another insurance, if you've found different insurance that'll do this, let us know. That would be good. Well, believe it or not, I actually have the same thing. My homeowner's insurance, somebody suggested it to me. It may have been you or it may have been somebody on the show. I've suggested a lot of things that I haven't taken advantage of myself clearly. I actually have, so I have my three most expensive computing devices covered under homeowner's. It's a similar thing. It's under $100 a year. They're just like, yeah, can we have the serial number and the name of the product? If it explodes or gets stolen or something, then they're like, okay, well, you're covered. Right. Yeah, here's a check. Well, the thing is the deductible is usually the biggest negotiating factor in a lot of these things, right? Well, if you just include it under your normal homeowner's, then yeah, whatever your big deductible, which might be $1,000 or even $2,000, depending on what you've got set up for your homeowner's, that's where the rider comes in. On our homeowner's, I think we carry to modify the terms. Right. Just for those specific things. Again, my drums are a $0 deductible, but my house, I think we have $1,000 or something. Whatever it worked out to be that was economical at the time. You could attach a rider that does your electronics at, like David just said, at a $50 deductible. Cool. I want to thank all of our MacGeek premium contributors who have contributed in the last two weeks. I didn't do this last week. My apologies, folks. Yeah, you were on the road. What's that? You were on the road. You were doing your thing. Was I? No, I don't think that worked. I don't have an excuse. 100 weeks before, whatever. Yeah, it's been crazy right here. The summer's crazy. It's just how it is, but it doesn't mean we're not thankful. In fact, it means we're even more thankful. All of you who contributed in the last two weeks, I want to send our shout outs to. On the biannual $25 plan, big thanks to Rich F. Kevin S. Harry M. Mike P. David R. Tom M. Mathias S., who's actually on the $30 every six-month plan. Dmitri S. Drew T. Jurgen G. William J. Gray J. West G. Mark R. Mike M. Fernando M. Allen C. Stuart M. Michael E. John L. Kirshen S. Michael C. Tony Z. Seth R. Martin B. Peter M. And Jonathan C. Thank you so much to all of you. And an equally big MacGeek family shout out and thanks to everyone on the monthly $10 plan that participated in the last month or the last two weeks. Bob L. Jeff P. John V. John D. Kaz M. Michael L. Micah P. at 15 every month. Ken L. Clive S. Dave G. Gary B. Jeff F. And Joseph B. P. So thanks so much to all of you. You know who you are because we just told you. Well, hopefully you already knew who you were before and then you just recognized. That would be interesting. If you don't know who you are, my advice is every day when you wake up, take your driver's license out, hold it up next to the mirror, make sure that's you, and then bonus, you get to check to see if it's your birthday. So that's fun. But no. The thing is you know that you rock. Whether you know who you are, doesn't matter. If you know you rock, you should know who you are. But maybe that's enough. If you just know you rock, maybe that's enough identity right there. You're good to go. Seriously, thanks, folks. It means a lot. Yes. Okay, now let's go to Neil. So Neil has a question. He says, I was curious as to your take on the talking about private cloud is what Neil is asking about. He says, I was curious as to your take on Synology Cloud Station versus Resilio Sync, which used to be BitTorrent Sync. Dave, he says, in listening to one of the recent TMO Daily Observations podcast, I noted that you seem to be using Cloud Station from Synology at this point. He says, if my memory serves me correctly, I seem to remember that at one time in the past, you were a user of BitTorrent slash Resilio Sync, likely back when it was still being called BitTorrent Sync. He says, I may well be misremembering that, however. He says, in any case, I agree with the comments in that episode, which I'll link to, regarding own cloud. Own cloud is an open-source-ish, self-hosted solution. You can host it on a Synology, but you can also host it on a Mac Mini or a Linux machine or a Windows machine. It's that kind of thing. Then there is something called Next Cloud, which is a spin-off of own cloud does the same thing. He says, the comments regarding own cloud where you said it's just too confusing and too annoying to configure and not worth the effort, he says I tend to agree with. He says, Next Cloud, supposedly based on own cloud, but with much of the complexity and configuration addressed, could be an option, he says, for personal cloud. But I still don't see the advantage of either of these packages versus the other two alternatives. He says, I've been using Cloud Station for some time and have found it to be quite reliable and extremely easy to use. I've also got a license for Resilio Sync. It was a discounted price and I figured the cost was not so big, so why not? However, I have found it to be much more confusing and cumbersome and have really not wound up using it. So I would appreciate your thoughts on whether it is a compelling reason to use Resilio over Cloud Station or any of the others. So you are correct, Neil, good memory. When I used Dropbox, as I think many of us did back when that was really the only option, right up until I got my first Synology and found Cloud Station and thought, okay, this is great. I can host my own cloud. So we're just talking about syncing files here, right? Which is, I mean, I say just talking about, it's a huge game changer for us when it happened years ago. And so Cloud Station was what I started using and that was on my first Synology. And I relied on it for all my Sync data. And then I switched to BitTorrent Sync when Cloud Station stopped reliably syncing my data. There was some weirdness with the way it was parsing things on my Mac and it got to be unreliable and BitTorrent Sync had sort of hit the market. So I started using that and that worked out great. Right up until the time that BitTorrent Sync stopped being reliable. There was something about Tilda's and filenames and yeah, it was almost like the same experience, right? It was like, oh, here we are. It sounds like they were both trying to disappoint you. Yeah, but the same time is like different times, right? Like, which is good. Yeah. So I went back at that point to Cloud Station after doing some testing, of course, and making sure that they had fixed the problems. And the Synology folks are really Apple fans and Apple users. So I knew that this problem would likely get fixed. And it did. And Cloud Station I've been using and relying on for maybe the last three or four years now. And I haven't thought twice about it. It works really, really well. Whether or not Resilio Sync has fixed those things. In fact, I think they have. I think I tested it and it's fine now. And the differences between Resilio Sync and Cloud Station, which now Cloud Station is being called Drive by Synology, but it's the same thing. The difference is that... Isn't it? Yeah. I mean, it's the same. Okay, so they rebranded it. No, because I've seen the name change. So they've changed the name of a lot of their things. But all right. So Cloud Station is now Drive. Yeah. And it's the same product. Yeah, it's the same. Unlike, like Photo Station is now Moments. And that's a completely, complete ground up rewrite of the way all that works. But with Cloud Station, I mean, I think the process is still called Cloud Station Sync or something, right? So with Cloud Station, the way that it works is very much a client server model. So if your Synology, which is what makes it private, is the server and then all of your clients sync with that. They don't sync with each other. With Resilio Sync, which it's important and helpful to remember that it used to be called BitTorrent Sync, there is no server. It is all peer to peer. But it's not BitTorrent in that it's like sharing with everybody. It's just sharing with your machines and it will do it over the LAN or over the WAN and all of that stuff. And it works well. And you can set up, and I had it set up, that I was running BitTorrent or now Resilio Sync on my Synology. So it was participating in this and acting as sort of the fixed storage for these things. But it was no more, it was a client just like everything else, whereas with Drive or Cloud Station, it is the server. So his question is relevant though. Is there a compelling reason to use Resilio Sync over Cloud Station? And there absolutely is one, and that's if you don't have a Synology disk station, because you can only use Cloud Station on the Synology. So if you don't have one of those, then Resilio Sync is a great option for private cloud. And if you want to go further than just file syncing, then that's where this own cloud and next cloud would be options to consider, because they certainly do this file syncing, but they also do CalDAV server, a CardDAV server, a mail server, if you want. Like a lot of the things that we talk about hosting as servers with our Synologies, own cloud and next cloud will do on say a Mac mini, and sort of makes setup, I don't know if it's easy or not, but it's just there. So hopefully that helps. You think that helps, John? It could. The thing I like about Synology is that they offer their service that lets you access their thing from anywhere. Yeah, an own cloud does that too. Yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to remember Synology's name for it, but they have a remote, yeah, I mean, like everything. Like everybody else, they keep changing the name. But the thing is, they do have a service where you can use a DDNS to access their stuff from outside. Yeah, you just type in your device's name.synology.me or whatever. So that's a nice feature as well, which if you're considering a private cloud service, you may want to consider, well, how the heck are you going to get to it? Right. Yeah, Synology. IP address or... They call it Quick Connect, John. Yes, I had to look it up. That's what they call it. Yeah, but you and I both use it, and I love it, because yeah, so on my iPhone, it's like, well, I'm going to see a file on my Synology. Well, because I have that name locked in, they make it easy. Yeah, exactly. You don't have to think. Cool. You want to take us to Chris, John? Chris has a good one, which I think is open to discussion, my friend. So Chris says, hey, guys, I've got a hard one for you. Well, I don't think so. Well, maybe we'll see, Dave. I'm looking for suggestions on how I can store my PDF file, so they are on my desktop machine safely backed up and somehow accessible for my mobile devices. But, and he put them in all caps, so that's why. Without using cloud storage as I'm trying to cut my expenses, my PDFs are mostly textbooks and software manual plus scan receipts. I don't like Evernote, which is what I'm using at the moment. I do have a Yojimbo license I could pull out of Mothballs, but when I had a look at it recently, it really felt a decade out of date and their iPad app is close to the useless. I also want something cross-platform, if I can use as my server, I'm sorry. I also want something cross-platform, so I can use my video, I can use as my video edit box, which is Windows 10. All right, so it is a Windows server. Oh, okay, I got it. So he needs to be able to store his PDF somewhere. It sounds like he's looking for public or private cloud, right? Correct. And he wants it to be cross-platform iOS, Mac OS, Windows. Right, so he has a Windows server that he's storing his data on, but he also has Mac devices. To continue, he says, I've tried storing them on the server and tried to pull the files on my iPad, but can't get either document 6 or good reader to connect to the SMB share, SMB being the Windows protocol for sharing your files. All right. Any bright ideas? Well, and this is Chris from New Zealand. So hello, New Zealand. Wow. People in New Zealand listen to us. They speak English, makes it easy. Oh, they speak New Zealand, right? Well, yeah. Anyways, right. Here's my response as follows. So Chris, to address your media issue, so I'm going to kind of come at the sideways, Dave, but I want to have a discussion, but to address your media concern or issue of not being able to access a Windows or SMB share from your iOS device, which can be tricky. I would think you'd admit, Dave. Yeah. But I found the following app does a great job. And we mentioned it in the past, then I found it, and I'm going to tell you about it again, but it's called File Explorer, File Manager. And they say, well, hey, access files in your computer or your NAS. And it's from SkyJoss, S-K-Y-H-A-O-S. So we'll put a link of that in the show notes. But basically, it's an app, an iOS app, that will talk to not only iOS and SMB shares, but also a lot of cloud services. And they have a free version and they have a give me money version. When I tried this, Dave, so I connected actually, so my Synology advertises itself as a SMB share. And actually, when you run this program, it comes up and it's like, oh, yeah, I see Mac and so I see AFP and SMB shares. You want me to connect to them? Give me the password. And it worked great. So that addresses his media concern, which is why can't I get the PDF files on my Windows machine? Sure. Yeah, fair. But I think we have a larger issue here, which is it sounds like he's looking for a long-term PDF repository. Well, he's looking for a repository, right? It could be PDF specific, but it doesn't have to be. Evernote is certainly an option, right? Which we use because we put PDFs in Evernote and then you and I can search and, you know, you know. But he, you know, as would Dropbox, but, you know, he's worried about paying for cloud storage. We just talked about Resilio Sync, which for most of what he wants to do, I think, would be free. We also talked about own cloud or next cloud, also available for free, which he could run. And then I mentioned. Yeah. And then I tossed into the ring here. So Synology recently launched their Office product. The only unfortunate thing, Dave, is that from what I can see is that their Office product doesn't specifically support PDFs. It supports Office formats and maybe you can squeeze a PDF in there. But I think my general advice to, my general advice to Chris is you, you want to, I think you want to seriously look at a private cloud solution, whether it be, excuse me. And the one thing I mentioned is actually we don't, I don't know if we've used their product enough, but Dave, but one thing that occurs to me, Dave, is that Western Digital makes a thing called MyCloud, which is basically a drive in a NAS and a cloud, very similar to what Synology and a lot of the other NAS vendors offer, which is, okay, here's a drive. You put it on the network. Okay. Go. Yeah. Because I haven't, I haven't used. I've used it. The WD cloud thing recently, but I see they advertise the fact that, well, we offer a cloud thing, but if you've had more hands on. Yeah. No, they do. It's just, it's really, it's feature limited. I get the feeling that for listeners of this show, you'd probably hit the walls there pretty quickly, right? Because it's very much a, here is the path that you shall walk to sink things with this device, and nothing outside that path is even remotely possible. And their iOS app was frankly a little wonky. It's been a little while since I've tested it, but it did not blow me away. What does interest me, and I actually have one here that I need to test, is the new box that Promise came out with that is, again, built to be similar, right? Private cloud and all that stuff. So I'm excited about that. And we'll circle back to that in the next week or so here. But yeah, I honestly would go with like ResilioSync for him and see how that works. As long as the, so I think the challenge was that, you know, can you get a client on your OS that understands PDFs? And the thing is, out of the box, iOS doesn't do a really great job of that, right? iOS, I think I'm misunderstanding what you're saying. I mean, iOS obviously can do it. Over SMB, over SMB, which is his use case, over SMB, iOS isn't the best choice to access PDFs over SMB. I thought, yeah, sorry, I was, I had left SMB behind. So, but yes, I totally agree with you. Yeah, yeah, he needs a different, a different answer. Yeah, yeah. And if they just added, you know, I was looking and so now of course, in the latest iOS, who have files, which has plugins for various cloud services and other optional services. And actually, that's another thing. When I was looking at files, it was like, Oh, well, you want to use TS file for this. Which is Synology's solution to let you access files using their, you know, amazing technology. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a tangled web sometimes, Dave. It is. Yeah, it is. It's, yeah, but, you know, we'll get there. Hopefully that helps. Hopefully, we threw some ideas out for Chris that, you know, that'll sort it out. But I think nothing will stick. I would start with Resilio Sync, honestly, because it's free and nice. Yeah. Yeah. And it might just work. So I want to talk about our third sponsor, John, which is Jamf Now. We're at jamf.com slash mgg. You can create your free account and your first three devices are always free, right? So Jamf Now makes it easy to set up and manage and protect all your Apple devices. It's easy to keep track of your own Mac, your own iPad, your own iPhone. But what about the other Apple devices at work, right? As your business grows, even as your family grows, you know, and I'm thinking about this a lot with my daughter away at school, you know, so does your digital inventory. And you can't necessarily put your hands on it right away. And that makes it exponentially harder to manage everyone's Apple devices. With Jamf Now, you can check your inventory. You can distribute Wi-Fi and email settings remotely. Yep, you can configure things. You can deploy apps. You can protect company data. You can even remotely lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere. Jamf Now manages your devices so you can focus on your business instead. And you don't need any IT experience to do this. So for MaciGab listeners, start securing your business today, setting up your first three devices for free forever. And then you can add more at just $2 a month per device, right? And it starts at just $2 a month per device because they've added some other features that you can actually get for a little bit more. So, but your first three devices are free, you add more starting at just $2 a month per device. Create your free account today at jamf.com slash mgg. That's jamf.com slash mgg. Our sincere thanks to Jamf for sponsoring this episode. All right. I got a note from Ed, John, and he reminded me that we never really followed up on this. He said, I've been waiting. Yeah. He says, I've been waiting for your review of the Sonos Beam that came out earlier this summer. He says, I have two older Sonos speakers and I need a new one to get airplay on all of them. I want to get the beam but have been waiting for your thumbs up first. So I did. Weren't you just there? I was. In the last week? I'm sorry. I saw your tweets. I was. Interject. So they like you and you like them. Absolutely. Oh, I've you know, any listener to the show knows that I've been a fan of Sonos for like seven years since I found it. I mean, they really do a great job. Their entire experience is very Apple like in that they make they make things that are difficult to do and they make them just work and they make them sound really good and being both picky with technology and picky with audio. It was sort of a natural fit that I might like Sonos. And as it turns out, I do. And yes, I was there this past week. I have nothing to say about that yet, John. How about the game? How about the game? I saw you review. That's right. Yeah, we went to a Red Sox game. I went to my this is going to sound strange to people who live in New England and around Boston. I have been to Fenway Park many times for concerts, John. But last Wednesday night was my first ever home Red Sox game. I'm pretty sure I saw the Red Sox play the Yankees as a kid down at Yankee Stadium, you know, the old Yankee Stadium. But this is my first time seeing them at home. That's cool. It was a beautiful stadium, especially for a baseball game. It kind of sucks for concerts. But for a baseball game, it's great. It really is. So I did publish my official review of the of the beam and I will I will link to that in the show notes. And absolutely, I gave it a thumbs up. In fact, comparing it to their play base, which they came out with. So the beam is is a it's a sound bar, right? And it's you could put it in any room of the house. And really, there's many rooms where it might work just great. But it has an HDMI input or an optical input so that you can use it as the sound delivery method for your TV, as well as for your music. And then because Sonos is wireless, really? Oh, yeah, it's awesome, man. Well, now they call it a bar. So I've seen some other bars that some other trade shows we've been to. And in my mind, Dave, a bar is something you put under your TV to give you better TV. That's right. I could be totally wrong. No, that's what this is. Maybe not. Yeah, no, that's exactly what it is. Yeah. A music device that could complement your your existing audio setup. Or it could be your audio setup. It'll it has it's it is it. I mean, it's stellar for music. Okay, so at least in the case of Sonos, what do they got? Go. Yeah, yeah. So the I mean, they have a lot of different things in the product line. They're previously announced play base and play bar, which were also built for the TV are $699 a piece. This beam is $399. So already it's way more economical. And I will I will at the risk of sounding a little bit too pompous, I will quote from my own review about the beam, because I think it actually answers Ed's question. And in that, I wrote the only problem I see, and it's not really a problem, is that the beam might make it difficult for Sonos to sell too many more play bases. This is not a problem for us as users. The beam sounds so, you know, we have one, we've tested it. All of us in the house can definitely tell the difference between the $399 beam and the $699 play base. But none of us could tell you which one sounds better. They have different sound signatures, but they are both stellar. And so with that, take the extra 300 bucks, put it back in your pocket, get the beam. And here's the interesting thing about, you know, there's just timing, right? We had we had the play base, and then I got the beam to test that and we put it in the living room, obviously, because that's where we need to test. And I put it right near where the the play base is because, you know, it's the TV, they all kind of have to be in the same spot. And it remained that way until yesterday. My son and I were talking about Sonos stuff, and I'm like, yeah, that's kind of ridiculous. We have the, you know, the beam and the play base, both in the in the living room. He's like, we do like, yeah, of course we do. He's like, well, which one do we use? I'm like, well, we can't go back and forth. He's like, okay, well, you know, we have another TV downstairs. Which one do we want in the main living room? And which one do we want downstairs? And it was like, I actually prefer the beam. Let's let's use the beam in the main living room. We can move the play base downstairs. And so, I mean, don't get me wrong. The play base sounds freaking amazing. But so does the beam. There really is no dip. So as of yesterday, we are running the living room solely on, well, not solely, the beam is at the core of it. We also have a sub and we've got a couple of speakers to use as rears so that we have a full, you know, 5.1 system. But, but even even comparing them without that stuff, I still like the beam, certainly enough to justify to not even suggest justifying the the additional cost of the play base. So yeah, man, short version head, thumbs up, man, go get it. It's awesome. Really, really well done. And the beam supports AirPlay 2. And the cool part is What's AirPlay 2? What does that let you do? Does it let you like target multiple devices? It's great. I can't do it because I don't think I can. Yeah, exactly. Well, and what's cool is, you know, so we have some Sonos speakers that are AirPlay 2 capable like the beam and and many that aren't like Ed, you know, he's got two older speakers that aren't, they just don't have the processing horsepower. Sonos does their level best to update the software on their devices to add new features all the time. Even devices that are 10 years old are constantly getting new features, but sometimes the hardware limits what the software can do. And in this case, my guess, I don't have any inside info on this, but my guess is that both CPU and RAM on some of these older devices aren't enough to have the buffers that Apple requires for AirPlay 2. But here's the cool part. If you start AirPlay 2 or AirPlay 2-ing to something like, say, the the beam and you have other Sonos devices, well, Sonos devices can be paired with one another. So if you have like an older Play 3 in the kitchen and a beam in the living room, guess what? You can AirPlay to the beam. And then from the beam, you can sync your music as you always can with the Play 3 in the living room or in the kitchen and you're good to go. So then you can play the same music in both places. So yeah, it works really. It's interesting. When they announced AirPlay 2, it was like, ah, yeah, okay. Like, I didn't quite get it, to be perfectly honest. I'm like, well, I've already like I've already invested. My home is a Sonos home. I don't know that I care about adding AirPlay 2 to this. And then, I don't know, just a couple of weeks ago, I was doing something and I was like, yeah, I really would like to have the sound of this. Oh, I was watching a fish concert, like a live streamed fish concert on my iPad in the bedroom. And I was about to take a shower. And I'm like, I would love to have this stream on just audibly. I wasn't going to bring my iPad into the shower. But, you know, I have a Sonos in the bathroom. We could have brought your don't you have these speakers that you want? Well, that's it. The Sonos speakers work great in the bathroom. And I have one in the, you know, in the master bath. And I thought, oh, yeah, I could AirPlay to the speakers. And then it was like, but I could AirPlay to all of the speakers in the bedroom. And sure enough, that's what I did. And so I had my iPad, you know, sitting in the bedroom. And I was AirPlaying to the speakers throughout the house. And then, and this is what convinced Lisa and I that we need a TV in the kitchen, is I we went down to cook dinner. And it was like, OK, well, we're not in the living room. So let's bring the iPad into the kitchen. And we watched the show on the thing while we had the audio going through the Sonos. It was like, OK, now I get AirPlay to got it. I'm fully on board. So I think you guys are just out of control. Well, that's true. Yeah. I mean, one kid's gone and you're kind of getting wild with the audio here. I mean, I don't know. Our kids came home that night. So we had it was just like it was a fish every now and then. They do live streams of most of their shows, video live streams. But and actually they use a lot of Apple hardware for that. We might have the guy that does that. This guy, Brad, that does that. We might have him on the show here. It's because it's really interesting to learn about how they do that. Oh, yeah. Oh, Brad. I mean, dude, I mean, Brad, I mean, we got to have Brad Sterling. Yeah. But they happen to offer a free stream this one night and it was like, OK, great. And so the kids get home and and, you know, we'd had it on. And so wait, they freely stream their live shows. Some you can. Most of them you have to pay for. But sometimes they'll offer a freebie because, you know, they want to get you hooked, right? Smart. Yeah. And so this was one night where they happened to do a freebie. It was like, OK, cool. And, you know, so there we are sitting on the couch or whatever. Amongst the the live music community, this is called Couch Tour, John, where you sit on the couch and you watch the fight. Exactly. So we're sitting there and the kids like walked in. Maybe Lucas was at camp. Skyler was like out of a friend's house or something and she gets home at like midnight and she sees us, you know, sitting there on the couch watching a fish show. She's like, what is happening around here? Parents are such nerds. Yeah. She's like, I don't, I don't even get it. You know, she's like, yep. Yeah. So I'm not going to tell my friends what you're doing. Oh, no. She loves to tell her friends. Yeah. I know. She's like, this is my friends are going to know what your parents are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My dad thinks he knows about the internet and podcasting. Right. Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, it's it's great. So cool. You think we have time to squeeze in this one more from Dusty here, John? Dusty is a good discussion point, but I think I think I got it on should we save it for the next episode and do Doug or do we do Dusty? Well, let me look at Doug. Hold on. You know what? I'm going to do a quick cool stuff found here then, John, because Gary sent in a very cool thing and it'll be quick while you look at that. But Windows 95 is now available as a Mac app. Oh, I saw that on my feed. Yes. Yes. As an app? Yep. You can download number one. Why would you even want that? Yep. But well, I mean, look, Windows 95 was sort of pivotal in the whole evolution of operating systems and all that. Right. I mean, they copied the heck out of Mac OS, but that aside, it was kind of a thing. So we'll put a link in the show notes to this. Gary sent it in. This is a it's a very cool thing. So thank you, Gary. And and and there did I give you enough time to answer the. Oh, no, Dusty. No, Dusty is good. And I think I'd like your input here. Go ahead. It's good. So Dusty says, good morning, MGG crew, which I guess is me and you. Ham radio. It's all it's the it's the Mac. You have family, man. Family. Yeah. So Ham radio is one of my hobbies and I have a connectivity issue. The programming software for a couple of my radios is Windows only. I have just this week gotten a new MacBook Pro replacing my 2011. The weight and the size had me thinking I will have it with me a lot more than my previous laptop. Awesome. Cool. And I'm thinking about an upgrade, but we'll talk about that in another episode. So anyways, I have installed VirtualBox, which is currently an Oracle virtualization product and Windows 7. I have no problem poking around the settings on VirtualBox to get things to show up most of the time, but a couple of radios, but a couple radios required the installation of a virtual Comport driver. Okay. So this is a Windows thing where sometimes they'll yeah, you got installed driver, not so much on the Mac, but Windows sometimes has this. So anyways, so he ran into this on the in the Windows environment. I think if I could find the radio, I can probably map the device to a port, but can't even seem to get the MacBook Pro to react to the radio getting plugged in. And here's the key and maybe I should cut it off at this point here. Okay. You think? Sure. I think I can cut it off. All right. Here's the problem. So the thing is, Dusty, VirtualBox is a fine virtualization product. The thing is, it has one little problem, which you've found. And the thing is I actually use VirtualBox when I was doing the corporate serial industrial device thing. And VirtualBox is a fine product, but here's the problem. It doesn't necessarily tell you what is going on. And that's the problem here because I verified this because Dave, I actually, in addition to you and I, updating our parallels licenses, which apparently they've changed their model and you sent me license and yay. So I'm running parallels so I could use it as a comparison point. But the thing is VirtualBox doesn't really deal with the presence of USB devices like parallels does. I'm going to tell you what parallels does. When you run parallels and you plug in a device, so I used my ScanSnap, one of my Fujitsu ScanSnap standards and I plugged it in. And as soon as I plugged it in Dave, parallels said, Hey, I see a USB thing. Do you want me to give it to the Mac or do you want to give it to the PC? Here's the problem Dave. VirtualBox doesn't do that. Out of the box. Now the thing is for what you're paying for it, which is nothing, it operates in a slightly different fashion. So here's the problem. So Dusty, I think you're going to find that this will work for you. So the thing is there actually is a little, so if you go to the bottom of the screen when you run VirtualBox, you will see a little connector that looks like a USB connector. Click on that. When you click on that, it's going to show you all the devices that it sees. And actually it's kind of weird because initially it'll say, Oh, I see your FaceTime camera, your IR receiver, which I have on my Mac, and a Bluetooth controller. And then it blanks out keyboard because you're just going to make your life miserable if you choose that. But the thing is, if you plug in a device by default, VirtualBox does not give you any sort of indication whatsoever that it's plugged in. But if you click on this little menu, it'll show you an additional device. So I plugged in my ScanSnap S1100. And the thing is on the menu, it shows that device there. The thing is, it doesn't tell you anything about it unless you choose it manually. If you choose it manually, and I did this because I actually, I did not have a VM set up for this, Dave. Sure. But I actually reinstalled a Windows XP because I'm kicking it old school, yo. Yeah. Of all Windows versions, I really liked XP. That was reliable. XP balanced performance with iCandy and that it didn't have too much. And I still know a lot of programmers. Now, the thing is now, if you run it, it'll say, well, dude, I'm not supported anymore. It's like, well, what are you nuts? But I still run a VM using it. But anyways, so to get down to it, what you have to do is number one, in the USB device list, you have to select the device itself. Then Windows will say, oh, I see you. Now I'm going to do the Windows thing, which is either search for a driver or add hardware or whatever Windows does. But the thing is, that's just, I wouldn't say it's a fault, but it's just a result of the behavior of VirtualBox. The other thing is that you can, so they have a list, which you can actually set up a filter list saying, oh, okay, if you see a device called this, then let it automatically connect to the environment. And that's the other answer. So not that VirtualBox is bad and parallels or VMware is good, but you get what you pay for. Yeah, totally. Right. No, that makes sense. You just got to wrestle with VirtualBox a bit in order for it to see your stuff. I'm sure once you, now the thing is, what concerns me is that he says he's using slightly dated ham equipment. The thing is also VirtualBox lets you map, now remember these Dave, comports. So the thing is, most modern computers within the last couple of decades use something called USB. Well, the thing is Windows machines use something called a comport, which is a different hardware address and just a different strategy. The thing is VirtualBox does give you the ability to simulate serial ports. So if it comes to that, you should be able to do it. You may have to wrestle with it a bit, but that's my answer. But I love this old school stuff, especially using software to talk to your ham radio that's Windows only or Windows only software. Yeah. Yeah, right. Well, that's good. Sweet. I think that's what we got for the day. I like it, man. That's, this is a fun one. It was good. You folks brought us in good directions. It was a potpourri. It was a potpourri. Yeah, man. Yeah. I'm not up on the potpourri. I kind of like your crouton thing better. I mean, at least they're edible. I mean, potpourri. Yeah, don't eat the potpourri, man. That's worse than Tide Pods. Maybe not, but don't eat Tide Pods either, kids or adults. All right. So we talked about the email. So you don't need to know that, but what you need to know. What do they need now? They need to know to visit us in our forums. Go to MackieGab.com slash forums. It's a great place. There's so much stuff going on there. It's been about a day since I've been in there, but otherwise I'm there every day. And John's going to be there every day. I recommend John that you subscribe your RSS reader to the forum posts feed that's right there. And then that way, I'll let you figure that out. That's an exercise for the listener. So I got to find a Mack RSS reader? No, I don't. I use, well, I use one on my iPad. I use Reader, R-E-E-D-E-R. But you could also use like, you know, Feedbin or whatever, right? But I subscribe to the new posts and that way I just can see them. It's great. Yep. I hear you, brother. So visit us there. It's great. We would love to have you. I want to make sure we thank the folks at CashflyCHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Of course, all of our sponsors, LinkedIn talent solutions, LinkedIn jobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. Of course, Otherworld Computing at MaxSales.com, Jamf at J-A-M-F.com slash M-G-G. That's right. Smile at SmileSoftware.com slash Podcast. Barebone Software at Barebones.com. Ring at Ring.com slash M-G-G. Code Revers.com slash M-G-G. Crossover. Our thanks to all of them. Our thanks to all of you. Seriously, thanks for listening, sending in questions. Thanks for 13 plus years. It's been, it's awesome. I know it's great. You have anything else, Dave? I think you have one, maybe two, maybe three more things. Yeah. Well, you know, I did when we dropped my daughter off. I'll share with you the piece of advice that I shared with my daughter and her new roommate. I know they were there. We had their dorm room set up. We had to leave. It was obviously very emotional. It was awful, frankly. But I did want to give them a good piece of advice. And I think it's one that will last not only them, but you through your lives, folks, and that is whatever you do, don't get caught.