 The Mac Observers' Mac Keekab episode 672 for Sunday, August 27th, 2017. Hey folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Keekab, the show where you send in your questions, your cool stuff found, and your tips. We share it all, we answer stuff. The goal is that each and every one of us, all of us, yep, me included, him included, everybody, all of us here, learns at least four new things each and every time we get together here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Braun. How are you doing, Mr. John F. Braun? I'm like at mission control here. Okay. With all my screens now, I'm like, surrounding my screens. That's good. Yeah, lots of screens. Yeah, that's good. So you are a dual monitor guy now, is that right? Yeah. So I could, so if we have any head scratchers regarding dual monitor ness. Yeah, I got one for you, because I've been a dual monitor guy, certainly, you know, longer than the shows existed. Yeah. Yeah, why doesn't my, why doesn't my mono price display always wake up when my Mac wakes up? This is your, what, your 5K display? It's a 4K, it's a 5K iMac with an external 4K. Okay, you'll have to send me one of those. A 5K iMac? Yeah. Yeah, you got to send me, I can't solve the problem unless I can duplicate your hardware. That's never been a requirement with our listeners before. I don't understand. Well, for you, because I want to do the best job. Right, right. No, it's a hardware problem. But it's not because a, an SMC reset seems to stave the problem off for a while. Yeah, it's crazy. And that is the solution. There's several other listeners that have the same issue with various third party displays. And it seems like an SRM reset, not SRM, I'm thinking, I got routers on the brain. An SMC reset is the magic answer there. So. I was actually surprised that this worked. I didn't really expect it to because it's kind of a hack. So what have you done? Well, so one of my screens, so before, so you know, I got this Asus 27 inch and I had it hooked up with a, it was a HDMI to DVI converter. Okay. Because that's how I had the other one hooked up and it worked fine. Yeah, okay. It's fine. When I wanted to hook up the second one, I'm like, well, you know, what about, how can I possibly do this? So I changed the connection for the 27 inch screen to HDMI and dug up an HDMI cable. And then I had a display port to DVI converter. And that's how I have the second screen. And the Mac just kind of figured it out. It does. Yeah. Worst I had to do was say, no, it's to the left of you. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Because it doesn't know it. It couldn't possibly know. Right. Right. Yeah. They come up, you know, I drag stuff from one to the other. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty sweet. Yeah. Yeah. That's good, man. Huh. Cool. Cool. Cool. I have. So you are, and this is on your Mac mini, I assume. Is that right? Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's cool. Are either of those, you know, what is it, UHD or as Apple calls it retina displays? No. Okay. No, they're. Okay. So you're not having to do any of the, like, kind of sort of scaling that happens for retina displays in the display system preference pain? Correct. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. The resolution is, I mean, technically HD, I guess, you know, it's right. Oh yeah. Yeah. At that size for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Fun stuff. All right. We got some cool stuff found to go through. We'll start with Allison over at podfeet.com. She says, I heard you say that you're checking out the 10 and a half inch iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. Check out the third party keyboard called MyScript Stylus. It lets you write with the Apple Pencil and have nearly real time character recognition as it turns your handwriting into typed text. It's counterintuitive that writing by hand is useful when typing is so much faster, but for lean back times, like on the couch or in bed, it works really well. I've written this email, in fact, she says with Pencil and MyScript Stylus, and she put up a little demo video that we will happily share with all of you. Yeah, I did it. I tried it out and I was impressed. You have to adapt a little bit to it, like any handwriting that's intentionally being recognized, but it works quite well. Yeah. That's pretty good stuff. Cool stuff found indeed. And then Mike has one. Any thoughts on that before I jump to Mike? John? No, I kick it old school. That's right. Okay. So Mike has actually has two of them for us. One is what I'll call a cool stuff found reprised because it's certainly been in cool stuff found in the distant, distant past. He says, I wanted to tell you about an app that I've been using for quite some time that simplifies the use of symbolic links to sync any folder on your hard drive to Dropbox. Several other cloud services are also supported and the app is called MacDropAny. And we've got a link for it at Zibity.com. He says, sure, one can use the terminal to do this, but I find that GUI is a lot simpler. I use this app to sync my downloads and documents folders via Dropbox so that I have the same content on both my Mac, my laptop and my iMac. And I also use it to sync settings folders for Mac apps that do not have built-in sync. I wrote a blog post on how to do this with Mars at it. Daniel Jalkett's excellent blogging software and we'll put that in the show notes too. He says, the best part about this app is that it's written by a college student and his donation where I gladly made a donation because I use it every single day. Hope it's helpful. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I like this. It's interesting and so I'm glad to bring it back around. So what Mike's trying to say. Yes, sir. What he's hinting at here is that if you want to use Dropbox to sync content outside of the Dropbox, you must use a symbolic link and not a alias? Correct. That's right. So if you put an alias in Dropbox, it's just going to... It will sync the alias file itself. It will sync the alias file, which is a tiny little file that's pointing to something else. Yeah, that's not there on the other machine. Okay. I thought I'd do the answer, but I just... Oh, that's... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And help people learn things. So symbolic links are something that's not something you can really do until now. Right. With an app. Right. Right. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And then Mike has a second one. He followed up with that and he said... I want to see how he described it. He says, the other thing that's kind of similar to this that I haven't tried is a MacUp, M-A-C-K-U-P, a command line utility that will back up settings and configurations for applications in Dropbox. It's a little more black boxy than MacDropAny. Have you guys tried it? And I had not. But it was pretty easy to install because it's a command line utility. So I checked my favorite package manager, which is Bru, and I typed Bru, space install, space MacUp, M-A-C-K-U-P, and boom, it installed it. And then I ran MacUp, space backup. And that created... It ran through and it showed me everything that it was doing. It created a 62-meg folder on my Dropbox with all kinds of things. And it gave me a little log. And it copied my settings for like BB Edit, for Better Touch Tool, for Colloquy, for Fish, which is the shell that I use, for Handbrake, for Hazel, Keyboard Maestro, Moom, Payspot, and this is just some of them. Transmit, TunnelBlick, all kinds of stuff. And what you can do is now I could go to another Mac or that same Mac. Let's say I wiped it clean and I would do MacUp, I think it's MacUp Restore. And it would bring everything back. Or I can do MacUp List and it'll show me what it's got. And I can say MacUp Restore SuperDuper and boom, it'll restore just my SuperDuper settings. So now I can take like my fish shell. I know I'm crazy, but I like to live in the command line. And so I use the fish shell, which you install, brew space, install space fish. And it's far more suited to me than other shells that are around. But one thing that's a pain is when I go to a new Mac, I have to copy all my settings and my aliases and all that. Well, no more. I just back it up with MacUp Backup Fish. Then I go to my other computer, MacUp Restore Fish. It pulls all that stuff in and I'm good to go. Which is pretty awesome. So then free, you know, be like that. So there you go. Now, check it out. Now, if you don't want to go to the command line like a caveman to do a brew stuff. Yeah. There's something called cake brew. And I'm going to link to that, which is a gooey. Oh, nice. Yeah, I kind of, I mean, my feeling, I'm glad you're recommending this. I don't mean to poo poo the recommendation. My feeling with graphic, and I know that I'm wrong on this, by the way, but my feeling with graphic package managers is why bother if I know that I'm going to use this stuff from the command line, why bother having a gooey to manage it? And the answer, at least to myself, is because it's much easier to see what packages you already have installed when it when they're just in front of you. So I should go get cake brew. Yeah. Well, it, I just started it up and it shows me that it shows all of my installed packages. Right. Yeah. No, that's not all outdated. All of them leaves. Yeah, look at that. It's pretty good. How do you install it? Can I type brew install cake brew or something? Uh, I think you just download it. Okay. Well, yeah, but that's no fun. I mean, you know, yeah, I can install you. It's a cask. Okay. So you do brew cask install cake brew. There you go. Fun. It's installing right now. Oh, I guess I already did this once. It's already installed. Fun stuff. You just don't use it because you like the pain. I like the pain. Yeah. Like, do you like suffering? So yeah, I do. In fact. All right. Everett's got a quick tip for us if we can go there. Everett says, with a Bluetooth keyboard connected to an iPad, try holding command down in different screens and apps. The iPad will display app or screen specific shortcuts right there. Very handy. So if you've got an iPad where you've got a Bluetooth keyboard on it, hold down the command key and boom, up come some shortcuts. Always good to push keys. I like that. Very, very good. You're not doing, oh, your iPad is still DOA. Is that right? Did you get it fixed? That's in the process of being fixed. Okay. All right. And then Scott has a lesson to share with all of us. Scott was, so he was, Scott was doing what seems to make sense. He, but he was having a, he had his router plugged into his cable modem via an ethernet cable as we all do. But instead of going direct, he went through the ethernet surge protector on his battery backup on his UPS. And he was having all kinds of problems with speeds. He got on the, he's got a Synology router. He got on a phone with Synology support and they couldn't figure it out with him. He was just, everything was limited to 100 megabits. And that's when he realized that the port on his UPS is a hundred megabit pass through port, not a gigabit or a thousand megabit pass through port. And so Scott was stuck at 100 megabits. He realized this eventually and plugged things in and it's all good. So the lesson from Scott, and I appreciate you sharing this Scott, is make sure that when you are doing ethernet surge protection, that you are doing it at gigabit speeds. A lot of the surge, of the ethernet surge protectors built into things like UPSs are all 100 megabit ports. And I know it seems weird, like why would it matter? Because it's just a pass through port. It should pass through whatever's there. Well, I don't know the answer to that, but I do know the practical implication. It does matter. The good news is that you can buy standalone gigabit ethernet surge protection in the form of the APC protect net devices. And so I'll put a link to one of those in the show notes. And I think they're less than 20 bucks. So that's the way to go. Do you do any ethernet surge protection, John? You should. No, yeah. Yeah, no, it would be good. I've never had a need. Well, that's the point. You want to do it before the need is there. That's my feeling. Now, the interesting thing is that almost every device, or at least most network devices, like a switch, for example, usually light up the light differently if there's a device on the network not operating at full speed. For sure. Yeah. And even my old cable modem, I'm not sure if my new one does. But I remember when I was looking at that Bitdefender box product. Yeah. And I plugged it in my cable modem because that's how it works. One of the lights was different. I'm like, gee, that's funny. I wonder what that means. And I looked in the manual and it's like, oh, it means you got a 100 megabit device plugged in. Right. Same with my router. I only have 100 megabit ethernet device. And that's my ancient GCC laser printer. But it doesn't really need to be gigabit, does it? No, it does not. I mean, I suppose, you know, if you sent the print job to it at a gigabit, you know, it may happen. Right. Right. Most of the time is spent waiting for it to render the page and print it, not getting the print job to it. Oh, yeah, that would make sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think, yeah, I don't think you're going to have a big issue there. But yeah, it's good to be aware of what you've got running it at gigabit versus 100 or even 10 gigabit. So. Okay. And I think, well, I don't know, we've got more tips to share. But the last one for this segment is from Bill. And Bill says, here's a suggestion for the guy who wants to make a group email list in contacts. Don't use MailChimp instead. This way your recipients can control their receiving address, unsubscribe, etc. And you can be sure that you are sending messages to the people who are supposed to receive them plus staying in control of who gets what. I don't know how many times I've gotten on someone's mailing list about something I have no interest in, often because they put in the wrong address. And it's nearly impossible to get off the list, especially when people in the group hit reply all. Even if I'm supposed to be in the group and I'm interested, I don't need to get constant replies of thanks or yes, be kind, asks Bill. Use MailChimp for group emails. It's free. And he's right. I think sending, there's some monthly limit on the free plan that like you can send two or 3,000 emails a month for free. And then after that, you know, they've got tiers of different ways to pay them for their service. But yeah, there really is no reason not to use MailChimp. It's really well done, easy to use, manages your list for you. They're really good at hitting the inbox, as opposed to getting relegated to spam and all that. But they're also very, very tight on their controls with what you can do so that they do remain able to hit the inbox and all of that stuff. So yeah, I think that's a good advice, Bill. Thank you for that. So it's up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month on MailChimp's forever free plan. Thank you too. I think it's Brian Monroe in the chat room who's feeding me this information in real time. So there you go. Yeah, thanks very much. Good stuff. Good, good stuff. Any thoughts on that, John? Hey, I've used them. I know. Or occasional. Yeah. Got another one of those that's going to come out. Yeah. To our premium members. Yes. Yeah, you can do a nice little template and fill it in and make it look all personal, like, even though it's, well, it is, you know, dear F name, comma L name or whatever. I will thank Jeff. So thank you, Jeff. Good stuff. That's who's feeding me stuff. I think it's both Jeff and Brian, but yeah. If you want to join our chat room when we do this, mackeykeb.com slash stream is where you can find all of that. And then you can sign up, you know, you can actually add our recording calendar to your calendar or busy cal, whatever you want. We publish a calendar at mackeykeb.com slash calendar. Surprisingly enough. And it's right there. It's the same calendar John and I use. So if any changes happen, you will see them. It's always correct. So and it's fun to have you folks in the chat room. It's and it's good. Obviously, things like this, we get real time feedback and results and it makes makes the show much better. It's much better than having to wait a week to offer clarifications or corrections. So good stuff. And I want to take this moment to thank all of our premium subscribers. If you go to mackeykeb.com slash premium, you'll see all the options for signing up. This is a program that we set up, frankly, because you folks asked us to. There are those of you out there that want to support the show directly. And it makes a huge difference. I don't want to say we wouldn't be doing the show without that, but we wouldn't be able to do the same quality of show without your support by far. So it really, really does make a difference. And if you're able to and interested visiting mackeykeb.com slash premium, we'll show you what you can do. One of the biggest perks that people get out of it is, in addition, of course, to that warm fuzzy feeling you get from supporting your two favorite geeks is you get access to our premium at mackeykeb.com email address, which is prioritized for all the questions and things that come in. So you help us keep the lights on, you know, we return the favor and help keep you help keep your computer on. There you go. So this week, subscription renewals on the monthly $10 plan came in from Luan D, Nick S, and Ken L. Thank you. Thank you to all of you. You rock. And on the bi-annually $25 plan, we had Ken L, Alan C, Sean M, Fernando M, Jurgen G, Jason W, Stuart M, Wesson G, Gray J, William J, Jason W, Mark R, Ronald G, Michael C, Kershin S, Peter M, and Martine B. Thank you so much to all of you. Like I said, it really, it makes a huge difference in so many ways. So thanks, you folks really, really rock. It's awesome. Hey, I know some of those people. Yeah, I know. That's the nice part is it's part of the mackeykeb family. It's good stuff. One big happy family. It is. Let's do a group hug. Speaking of group hugs, we have quite a few questions that came from our Facebook group this week. And we'll start with the first one that came from Steven. And it's a simple question. But boy, howdy have we heard from a lot of people on this. And Steven's question is, I'm currently using Crash Plan to back up. He says I used it to back up my Macs and my Synology. I've got about seven terabytes on my Synology, any backup, any recommendations on other backup options. So for those of you that haven't heard Crash Plan this week announced that a year from October, so October 2018, they will forever shut down their Crash Plan for Home service. Which is a cloud based backup. Cloud based backup. That's right. Yep. And isn't that great? Well, at least they warned people ahead of time. They did. But here's the thing. You can't buy a new Crash Plan for Home subscription anymore. And you can't renew the one that you have. So if your plan, but they did give everyone a two month extension, no matter when your plan was supposed to expire. So if your plan was supposed to expire or even renew this coming week, it won't renew. But you have two more months. And that time hopefully can be used to get you migrated over to a new cloud based backup service before this one goes away. Now Crash Plan in and of itself is not going away. It's just that their Crash Plan for Home service goes away. Now this kills off a couple of things. It kills off that, you know, really nicely priced $5 a month backup, which was unlimited in its own way. And it also kills off the peer to peer backup service. So like right now, Pilot Pete and I, we each put Drobo's at each other's homes. And I back up my stuff using Crash Plan to my Drobo at Pete's house. He does the same thing here at my house. We will not be able to do that past October of 2018. The nice part about that is it's free. I kind of get why Crash Plan is finally doing away with it, but because it does use their servers not to pass data through, but to coordinate the connection between us. So that's going away as well. So if you're doing that, even if you didn't have a subscription to Crash Plan Home, you cannot do that past October 2018 either. So it's time to start talking about options. I'm going to point out a couple of them, but I'll start with the easiest option. And the easiest option is to upgrade to a Crash Plan for small business, or Crash Plan for business plan. That's $10 a month. That's not bad. It's not. It's 100% increase. Correct. It doubles the price. But, you know, for Stephen... Even $10. Well, if it's just your Mac, I have better options for you. I don't think you should stay with Crash Plan. But if it's your Synology, that's one of the cheapest ways to do this. And I've done a lot of research on this. Crash Plan is unlimited storage. So for $10 a month, you can back up anything you want. Stephen says he's got seven terabytes on his Synology. I've got 12 on mine. So that's not so bad. I did the math on Stephen's seven terabytes. And to do it at... So there's a couple of services out there. Amazon has one called Glacier, which is the least expensive. It's relatively slow to restore from in that you kind of have to put in a restore request. It then packages the data and within a few hours or a day, it delivers it to you. But Amazon Glacier would be the least expensive of those at, I think, for seven terabytes about just shy of $30 a month. Backblaze, who we'll talk about in a minute with their sort of consumer product, Backblaze also has what I call just cloud blob storage available. They call it B2. And B2 would run you about $35 a month for the same thing. You get faster restores, but I'm not sure if that's the... What the goal is. To me, cloud backup is sort of the last line of restore. I don't want to say it's the last line of defense. Everything in your backup structure is your lines of defense, and I don't think any of them is less important than the other. But in terms of restoring, the cloud is the last place I'll go. If I have copies of my data locally, it's going to be faster to restore from a local copy than it is from something where I have to download over the internet. But it is there for that utter disaster when everything local to you gets wiped out. So it's possible that something like Glacier would work, but Glacier is going to be almost three times the cost of CrashPlan. Here's the thing. It's 10 per computer, but what you could do is backup all your Macs, like we talked last week. You could use Synology's cloud station backup from your Mac to backup to your disk station, and then just have your disk station back everything, including your other backups up to CrashPlan. Restoring from that, totally doable, but somewhat tedious, because you've got to restore everything down to your disk station, and then from there, you could unpack it and do that. You could also time machine to your disk station and then back that up to the cloud. So depending on how confident you are in your other restore methods, that may or may not be the right thing. But you could set it up where you've got just one CrashPlan account, 10 bucks a month, and if you blaze everything over to the one device, and it could just be another Mac, then that could back up to the cloud and then you're covered. Backblaze, though, is if you've just got a Mac that you want to back up, Backblaze is by far going to be the easiest solution, and I think best solution for a Mac owner to do that. And you can go get a Backblaze account, just go to Backblaze.com. Actually, they're not an active sponsor of Mac eGab, but they were recently enough, such that if you go to Backblaze.com, that link still works. It gets you your 15-day free trial, and then it is just five bucks a month for each computer from there, and they've got other plans that you can sign up for as well. So that would be my recommendation. Thoughts on that, John? Sounds good. What do you use for your cloud backups, John? Well, a few different things. Nothing for a full backup. That I just do locally to my technology by a time machine or other means. But you know, the select data, OneDrive, Microsoft's OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, I think one other. So you don't really have a cloud backup? That is correct. Not of my entire system. Shame on you. Hey, I upload the important stuff to the cloud. Okay. Like, do I, I don't know. I would argue that I probably don't need a clone in the cloud. It's handy. It's nice. But you know, I make a carbon copy cloner backup in the time. Right. You know, I wouldn't say that having a clone in the cloud is valuable at all. Cloning your operating system and your applications to the cloud doesn't, to me, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But getting all your data and all of your settings and all of that stuff. And that's sort of the nice thing about back plays is it, you know, you can tweak it and customize it, but you don't have to. They are Mac people there. They totally understand how the Mac works and what the right things are to backup to the cloud. And they just go do that and then omit things like Mac OS that you don't need to back up. So yeah. Yeah. So this is, um, that I don't think my advice on this is going to change. I mean, I really like the idea of using some blob of cloud storage and then some backup software that just uses that like there's a great piece of backup software called ARQ arc backup at arcbackup.com that will do this and it'll do all kinds of things. It'll backup to back plays be too, like we talked about it, it'll back up to Amazon, but it will also backup your files to Dropbox, um, you know, Google Drive, OneDrive, those sorts of things. And the nice part is you pay once for the software and then that's it. You know, you don't have to, you're not paying a monthly fee to use the software, but you are paying your monthly fee for whatever storage you happen to use. But it's storage agnostic and there's something nice about that. But cost wise, I think it's going to be tough for most people to beat that five bucks a month from back plays or even that 10 bucks a month from crash plan for business. So that's where I am on it. Be curious to hear what folks think about all of that because, uh, yeah, because there you go. That's that. Anything more on that, John? All right, we'll go on to Luke then. Luke also posted on Facebook, he asked, he says, I'm curious about routers that can share a printer. Is it a common feature or something only found on certain brands? I've been using an Apple router for so long, I wouldn't really know if it's just an Apple proprietary thing or not. Um, the reality is that this is a very common feature. Netgear routers have this, D-Link routers have it. I'm trying to think, just, I mean, most third-party routers support it. Not all of the routers from every manufacturer do. They have to have a USB port, but pretty much any router that's got a USB port, and I put a big asterisk there, except for most of the mesh offerings that have USB ports that are totally non-functional. Netgear's Orbeez USB port is functional for exactly this. And Synology's router also supports it. Here's the cool part. Remember last week we were talking about Synology's disk station's ability to share a printer with AirPrint so that you could print, you know, from your iPhone to a printer that doesn't support AirPrint. Well, I figured out this week, Synology's router supports that too. AirPrint and Google CloudPrint, it can take any printer, including a network printer, and just make it there. Which is that, you know, that's one of the, one of the reasons I really like Synology's router is the software in it leverages, you know, years and years of the disk station's management platform. So you get a lot of features that you just can't get in other routers, but, but yeah. And I'll tell you who else supports it, Dave. Yeah, man. Because I had this experience until I went to the hero. But when I had the TP-Link Archer C9, now they did it kind of in a weird way. So they support disk sharing. So it has a USB port or two, I think. So it supports disk sharing, which I think a lot of routers do as well. That's true. If you have a USB port. Yeah. There's what's kind of weird though in that it, so you plug a printer in, but then you had to run this thing called USB printer control utility. And it kind of created a virtual printer in that you couldn't add the printer through the Apple utility. You have to run their utility to do it. But once you do it, it worked fine until there was a problem because it has a kernel extension. And so when you upgraded to, I think it was 10.12, all of a sudden it didn't work anymore because it had an unsigned kernel extension. But I'm looking now and apparently they've upgraded for 10.12. So that was the downside. So they did it in a wacky way, but so just caution with them is their implementation is kind of wonky. Yeah. Yes. At least for the Archer, they may have changed it. Their other routers may do it differently, but this particular one did it in a kind of strange fashion. I'm trying to think if the Deco supports print sharing. I forget if it does. I am checking right now. Advanced. No, not that I can tell craziness. But yeah, it's pretty common feature and it's certainly a handy thing to be able to do that. So okay. Also from a Facebook conversation, Daniel asks, he says, my Bluetooth headset always connects right away to my iPhone 7 plus when I turn it on. However, sometimes the phone doesn't recognize it as an audio device for a while, sometimes a few seconds, sometimes longer. The battery indicator appears next to the Bluetooth symbol, but the headphones icon does not. Often if I just start playing something, then it will play out of the phone speaker for a little bit, then switch to the headphones after a second or two. But sometimes that doesn't work. So I tried turning the headset off and on a few times. I recently found that if I go to settings and manually disconnect and reconnect, it will connect with audio right away. Or at least it did that in two of my three tests. I don't know much about Bluetooth connections, but I think that it seems to indicate that it works fine when the phone initiates the connection rather than the headset. Also, when the audio is not connected, the button on the headphone still works to play and pause because it sees it as a remote control. Any thoughts on how I can force the phone to automatically try to connect to reconnect the device when I turn it on? Yeah, I've experienced this too. And I'm seeing that at least in the last few iOS 11 betas, it has gotten a lot worse. Things never connecting. I mean, that's beta, so take that feedback for however you like. But we are getting close to release date on that and that particular thing has not been overly addressed. But yeah, I mean, I've seen this with iOS 10 as well. Sometimes removing the Bluetooth device from your Bluetooth list and repairing it can help, but sometimes that won't help. I've got one iPad that I routinely have to reboot because its Bluetooth connection just shuts down. I can't even pull up Bluetooth in system settings. In that case, and in most of these other cases, what has fixed it is to make a backup of your iPad or iPhone, do a firmware reinstall, and then you can restore from a backup because generally those caches and things don't get pulled in and restore. So I know that's not fun, but without any other ability to granularly troubleshoot on iOS, we don't have many other options. So sometimes a wipe and restore is the answer. Crazy as that might seem. You got any thoughts for this? Mr. Braun? None at all. None. Zilch, huh? That's it. I know. I'm just curious if you had any troubleshooting thoughts. All right, one last one from Facebook and then we'll get back to things via email and all that. But the Facebook group's been going pretty gangbusters lately. Some great discussions there. Listener Ted, actually Ted Landau of MacFixit fame says, I have a friend whose iMac has been plagued by a growing assortment of odd problems. At this point, I suspect corrupted system software is the root cause. What I would do if it were my setup is make sure I have a mirrored backup, a clone, I'd erase the internal drive, reinstall a clean out of the box version of the system software. Then assuming that the reinstall went well and no problems are evident, I would start manually adding files back from the mirrored backup and reinstalling apps. The hope would be to avoid copying back, of course, whatever had caused the problems in the first place while restoring all the other needed files. This can be quite time consuming and tricky. Assuming you even agree with this solution, my main problem is my friend lives too far away for me to visit and she is very unskilled in any sort of troubleshooting. She would not know how to even begin doing all of this. She has no current clone nor any knowledge on how to do a clean reinstall. And she certainly doesn't have the skill to deal with the nuances of how to add back files. So what do I tell her to do at this point? What do you think the best strategy is? So I'm curious, we should bat this around a little bit, John, but I think in this scenario, I would have her reinstall Mac OS right over the top of exactly what she has. Just reinstall. I always call that a maintenance reinstall, where you're not blowing away anything. You're just putting a fresh copy of the system software right on top. If she's got from recovery, from recovery mode. Yeah. Thanks, John. Yeah. Right. Because that way you're at least getting her back to a point where you know that the operating system she's running is running well. And maybe that'll do it. I mean, I've seen that solve a lot of problems. And that is something that you could walk her through remotely. Now, I would be far more comfortable if she had a backup. I mean, if she doesn't have a backup of her stuff, that's bad for lots and lots of reasons. This is only one of them. So walking her through, getting a cloning operation or a time machine set up. I mean, I think that's pretty good. That should be done anyway. But yeah, the maintenance reinstall, generally speaking, isn't going to cause catastrophic harm. So without a backup, you could probably do it, but it's not recommended. What do you think, Van? You still with me? Yeah, I'm still with you. I'm just, I mean, yeah, reinstall. The OS sounds like a place to start. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, if we're talking sluggishness and slowness, you know, clean thing, not to support people. That's not a bad idea. I don't want to skip that comment you just made, Van. Running Onyx on this might be a really good idea. Yeah, I don't know if that's for the average bear, though. Well, yeah, but it's pretty easy to walk somebody through that. You just bring them to the automation tab and, you know, have them run it. I mean, you could get them, I mean, I use this, but, you know, set up a session with TeamViewer and do it remotely. TeamViewer, which is a remote control software that is free for non-commercial use, and I think this is non-commercial use. Otherwise, you've got to throw them some money, which you should, because it's the best cross-platform remote thing that I've experienced. Oh, same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I like that advice, man. And what else? What have we talked about? Safe boot. Cleans out some cruft. That's always a good go-to, right? Yep. Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, doing a safe boot, I'm trying to think, I think running Onyx will do almost all of the same things that a safe boot does and then some, but yeah, I mean, the nice part about Onyx is you can do it, like you said, from remote. A safe boot, not as easily. It's still doable, but just not as easily. Yeah, and I found sometimes it gets kind of persnickety. You got to hold down the keys just the right time. I've had times when I just couldn't get it. I don't know. Yeah, same. Getting old, man. I don't think that's the reason, John. I mean, it's true, but it's not the reason. I've always found the timing on holding down the keys to do that, to be very specific. It is, yes, very specific. Yeah, I would agree with that. And PJ in the chat room says, without TeamViewer, you can just use messages to initiate a remote. Yeah, I always forget about that. Yeah, thanks for the reminder, PJ. That's right. And that works great. Works great. All right. Good stuff. Good stuff. We had a couple of USB-C questions. You ready to head there, John? I'll let you lead. Okay. I'm not there yet. I'm on USB-B and A. Right. Yeah, I am too, but I think we can handle these. I think we're going to be all right. Chris asks, he says, I recently bit the bullet and went to one of the new Touch Bar MacBook Pros, a 2016 15 inch, to be exact. I have been going crazy with all of the conflicting opinions I'm getting online concerning a MacBook over at USB-C. My initial thinking was that you could charge any of the three USB-C MacBooks, 12, 13, or 15 inch, with any battery pack or USB wall charger. Many online are saying that these should only be charged with the included chargers or the battery will be damaged. I've also seen a few USB-C battery packs and car adapters that will charge more slowly, but will work. Can you guys do a segment on this? What will work? What won't? Most importantly, will these damage the battery or not? Here's the thing. We don't have enough empirical evidence to stand here and tell you what the best advice is, but we do have some anecdotal evidence. The anecdotal evidence is I've seen a lot of people charging all variety of MacBooks and MacBook Pros over USB-C with batteries or other power devices, docks, and things like that. In general, the battery either has the ability to provide enough juice to charge the thing in power at the same time, or it doesn't. Again, anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that nothing bad happens to the MacBook or MacBook Pro in the case of the latter where it doesn't. We can't guarantee that because we haven't seen it happen for long enough. There's lots of things that Apple says don't do this, and over years we find it's totally fine to do that. I get why Apple would say don't do that because it makes their support infrastructure and the whole paradigm much simpler. That's fine, but it's not always convenient to plug into a wall. In fact, it's super convenient to be able to recharge your MacBook from an external battery. Something that we've all wanted to do with laptops for years, and it's always been difficult because Apple's always had very strange power connectors. Whether or not USB is strange is irrelevant. It's standard, so that's a good thing. Those are my thoughts on it, and I know there are plenty of batteries out there. I know Anker's got one that will absolutely charge a MacBook over USB-C, and I know people that have used it routinely and they love it, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily not going to cause problems four years down the road. What do you think, Mr. Braun? I think that I just got some new chargers that aren't Apple branded, and they seem to work. And that they don't have an Apple logo on them, and then I think they're kind of shady. Yeah, one of my chargers from my MacBook Pro here, so I take the 85 watt charger. I find one on Amazon, and everybody's giving it five stars, but it's not from Apple. It's from someone else. I mean, it looks the same. It takes the same plugs. It negotiates. They've got a magic chip in there that negotiates with the computer and says, yep, and if you look in System Profiler, it'll actually say, okay, here's the vendor, here's the type, and it looks like an Apple charger. I don't know how they got away with it. Yeah. I don't know that I would trust that, to be perfectly honest, because MagSafe is a very different thing. And perhaps that's where Chris's hesitation comes from, is that we've learned for years that what you just described that you're doing to your laptop is almost universally not advised. It doesn't mean that you're going to have problems, but it means. I don't think I will, because so I did verify. So I'm looking at the, so I use our friend iStatMenus, and the thing is the voltage, the current, and the power which iStatMenus will tell you for the DCN are all within spec. Okay. The funny thing is when, you know, when I did this, and you know, I sent out a tweet about it, a few people got back to me, and one person actually sent some videos. I'll see if I can dig them up. Fire and melting and. Well, telling you here's some things to look for to detect a charger that may be kind of shady. Here is one interesting piece of advice, Dave. Weigh it. Oh, that's interesting. The thing is I weighed my original charger that came with the computer and still works. And it weighed about 300 grams. These knockoffs weigh about 200 grams. So there's definitely something different going on inside. And they also run a little warmer. They get up to about 100 something degrees, which I found because I used my little seek thermal camera thing. So they run a little hotter, but I think they'll be okay. We'll see. The thing is, if I'm if I'm going to be using them, I think I should be in the house. Oh, yeah. Well, the thing is I was thinking, you know, should I, you know, maybe charge my battery while I'm out and about? And I'm like, I don't know if I trust them that far. Right. Well, but see, that's the that's sort of the nice part about moving to USB is it is a standard. And so you don't, to find some third party alternative, like, like what you're talking about here, and Dan in the chat room just says, I've been using sketchy third party MagSafe chargers for years and my battery still seems to work okay. And he, you know, left it with a little smile. But it has to be either it's either Apple or it's it by definition, it's a knockoff and not, you know, you assume the company is some fly by night company with USBC like this is a known quantity, it's acceptable and people can build for it responsibly and be upfront about that. So you've got companies like anchor and tilt and and ventev and, you know, I mean, all sorts of people that can like be responsible companies and make USBC power devices, it doesn't mean that they're all going to be great. And we've seen USB power your iPad is great evidence that's that's built like crap and it will blow up your stuff. But if you buy from a vendor that's a known quantity, I think you're going to be okay, because USB is USB. So, you know, this probably there's still going to be sketchy vendors out there, but just don't buy from them because you're not forced to like like you are. Right. So I mean, you're not forced to but you are if you want to save a few bucks off of Apple's premium price. So there you go. Yeah, because retail on it is 89 bucks. Right. That's crazy. These that I bought were 29 bucks. Right. And I've been, you know, my I've got a sort of like half sketchy charger. It's way more than half sketchy. It's like double sketchy because it's it's got a a break in the line, but it was built that way so that you could use it with a battery like somebody had hacked up a MagSafe charger so that you could either plug it into the wall or disconnect it from that and plug it into an external battery that would then power the thing. And that's what I use that that thing charges my MacBook Air 95% of the time. I only charge my MacBook Air on an Apple charger when I'm traveling because the Apple charger lives in my bag. So, you know, sketchy chargers, we don't we can't recommend them. It would be irresponsible to doesn't mean we don't use them. But with USB-C we don't have to. So that's which is good double sketchy. There you go, Andy. Yes. All right. And then while we're on the USB-C thing, listener Jeff asks, I have a new MacBook Pro and an LG 4K display. I want everything going through the one USB-C cable to the display. And I'm nearly there. The only thing that isn't there is audio out. I've tried a USB to 3.5 millimeter adapter and it didn't work. I haven't had any luck finding anything on Amazon apart from the $50 USB sound cards, expensive USB to HDMI adapters or of course Apple's insanely expensive HDMI adapter, which has way more functionality than I need. I don't need video. I just need audio for my speakers. Do you know of an inexpensive way to send audio over USB 3 or USB C? One of the devices plugged into my monitor is a USB 3 hub. So yeah, let's talk about this. USB in any of its form factors is just a bus, a digital bus. Audio in the end is analog, right? Because our ears are analog. So have to go from digital to analog. And USB doesn't do that. So when you talk about a USB to 3.5 millimeter adapter, really what that is, is in there should be, almost would have to be, a digital to analog converter. And I'm surprised that this didn't work for you, but it's possible that it did and you just didn't know it. So when you plug this device in, it should, like any other USB device, it should register itself in system profiler, right? And to me, the best way, well, and John's going to have an even better way. But the way I do it is I launch system profiler, I go to the USB section and I look at everything that's there, then I plug in the new device and I hit command R for refresh. And I look to see what was added if anything. And if nothing was added, then I know that the system's not detecting this, but it will show up as a device if it's going to work. And it might show up as a device, even if it's not going to work, because after the system sees a USB device, then it needs to load a driver for it. USB audio is a pretty common thing and you can do some crazy stuff without any custom drivers. So I would assume that anything that's just like a two channel, which is what your headphone jack thing is, shouldn't need a driver. It does need a driver, but that driver is built in to macOS. It's possible that you plug this thing in and the driver was recognized, everything was fine, but you didn't switch your sound output to it. So go to system preferences, sound, go to the output tab and choose whatever this new device calls itself. And maybe that would do it. But you're definitely employing a DAC, a digital to analog converter, for this scenario. And yes, you can find some very, very inexpensive DACs. Like the little dongle that comes with the iPhone 7, right? That's got a lightning to three and a half millimeter jack or whatever it is. That's got a DAC in it. And as does anything that's going to do this, because that's how that works. It's not analog output, it's digital. But you can find inexpensive DACs. You can also find very, very expensive DACs. I mean, for example, I use one on my Mac in the office. I use the audio engine D1. And I mean, I never thought it would matter until I heard the sound of that thing. You know, I plugged my speakers into my Mac, played music, plugged my speakers into this thing, played music. The sound field was wider. It's stellar. Because they do some great things in there, not only do they have a great DAC, but they've got discrete power so that you're not getting noise in there. It really did feel like I took my speakers and moved them wider apart without losing any of the sound field. So what I'm saying is, yes, you can most definitely tell the difference between a low quality and a high quality DAC. But regardless, you need something. And I think you would have had something if you found something on Amazon, even for like eight bucks, you can get a not great DAC that would work. I don't know. What do you think? Think about what? Any of this. Hardware growler. Yeah. I knew you were going to mention hardware growler. You knew. I did. So explain what this would do and how it would help our friend Jeff troubleshoot this. Well, hardware growler will tell you when devices are connected or disconnected via various protocols, one of them being USB. So anytime I plug something in that's USB, it'll say, Hey, this is what I think this is. Here's the profile or the name of it. That can be useful. The other thing I find it very useful for is to see when people are pulling sneaky software update activities in the background, like Google and some others. So I think they stopped doing that. Now, I think they still do that with Chrome. But at some point, if you're going to do a software update, you're going to have to run an installer. And what I'll notice is that all of a sudden I see in the corner of my screen, it says, Hey, a disk image called Google Chrome, blah, blah, blah, just mounted. I'm like, Oh, that's interesting. And then it goes away. Yeah, it's a really, no, I find it really good for troubleshooting. And yeah, I mean, especially if you have a device that's freaking out. Now, sometimes it may tell you too much stuff. Like, you know, the other day I was saying, you know, it's, you know, all like using handoff, you'll see lots of Bluetooth messages. Can you customize that? Can you tell it? Hey, look, well, you could say shut up, just stop. I don't think you can filter. Okay. So it's either tell me everything that you're doing Bluetooth or don't. I see. So I could tell it just like, if there's too many Bluetooth messages, I could just say, okay, forget it, like no Bluetooth, please, but it would still show me USB and disk images, that sort of that's the level of granularity. Okay, all right. Yeah, no, because that would totally be what Jeff needs. I mean, if he plugs that thing in and it pops up, like the instant gratification, you know, right away, what's happening. So, yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. All right. Let's move on. We've got some tips and such. I wanted to talk about malware scanners, John, because we've, things have changed a little bit in our Mac universe. And while it's not imperative that you run some sort of malware scanner, I would say that it's, my advice on this has changed. It used to be, don't run any of these kinds of things. They're going to cause you problems and they're not going to help you. My advice now is, you know, they might help you. There's certainly enough floating around out there that, you know, you might want to do this. And previously, my advice was run something called malware bytes, once a week to just scan your Mac and make sure it, you know, picks up anything that might have come in. And we had put together, Jeff Butts had put together a great article at TMO about how to use, I think it was with Keyboard Maestro, to trigger a launch of malware bytes, you know, once a week or whatever, on whatever schedule you wanted, because it wasn't automatic. It wasn't internally automatable. That has now changed, though. The new version, 3.0 of malware bytes, will run in the background. It has a real-time protection scanner that is a for-pay service. You get it for 30 days for free. And then after that, I think it's 30 bucks a year. I had a big problem with it this week when I realized that it's real-time scanner engine was using, I think what, six gigs of RAM? Oh, small memory leak there. Yeah, that's a problem. I wrote to them and didn't hear anything about it. But this morning, before the show, you pointed out that you were on version 3.0.2 of it. I was on 3.0.1. I found no way in the software to have it check for an update. There was also no way in the software to quit the real-time scanner. I could turn off the real-time scanner, but it did not flush itself from RAM, so it wasn't really that helpful. But I rebooted my Mac, and on reboot, it said, hey, there's an update to malware bytes. Do you want to download it? And then it downloaded it. I found a lot of software rebooting your system prompts them to phone home and say, hey, is there a new version? Yeah. Good software. So I'm wagging my finger at them. Good software lets you do it manually as well. Right, right. But I'm sure the malware bytes people are going to put that in in the next version. Are you sure of that or are you hopeful? If anybody's... I would encourage people to encourage them to do that. I don't see why you wouldn't. Well, I agree with that, but there's yes. I mean, pretty much the standard I've seen with most software, it's usually in the help menu or sometimes in the preferences. Right. A lot of times I find in the help menu, there's check for update or in the main menu for the app itself, it'll say, yeah, check for update. So yeah, at the moment, I don't know that I would recommend malware bytes background scanner. I need more time with it to see if this memory leak is fixed. And like you said, they need to pay a little more attention to this product so that you can really control it and do the things you need to do. With the version I'm running, it's taking up 400 megs. When was the last time you rebooted your Mac? I think after I installed it and then I also upgraded to... Days. Like what's your uptime? Uh, no, last night because I installed a, you know, I threw down some coin for Little Snitch 4. Got it. Because why not? Yeah, I was in a mood to throw some money around. Yeah, well, that's what I'm saying. And reinstalling that reboots the system. Reboots the system. Okay, so you haven't, like this was days of the system being up and it had crept up to six gigs. But I quit it. Without rebooting my system, I quit the scanner to free up the RAM. And I think this was Thursday. And this morning, it was already back up close to two gigs. So we'll see. We'll see how it does. I rebooted it, I don't know, a couple hours ago before we started the show and I'm already up at 121 megs, which isn't, I mean, that's fine. So we'll see, we'll see where it goes. But I'm going to give it a couple of days. I'll report in our Facebook group at mackeycom.com slash Facebook. Yeah. But does anybody else make a scanner? There is the new drive genius five from pro soft includes a real time scanner. And I have had great luck with their real time scanner. It's not causing any RAM leaks. It happily runs in the background. It has found things for me that I'm very pleased with it so far. And I'm going to mention another one, Dave. Yeah. And there's a very good reason I'm mentioning them. There's something called Clam. Okay. Clam XAV. And does that do real time in the background? I think it depends on the version you get. I thought it only could do that on Windows. I didn't think it was doing real time on the Mac. Hmm. Yeah. I think that's just a manual scanner. Unless it's changed. Yeah. The reason I mentioned them and they're worth looking at. So first, you know, they set me up. They set me up with a copy. Thank you very much. And I do have on my system a couple of pieces of malware just for fun to run detectors. And sure enough, it found them. But here's the other interesting part, Dave. You know who Drive Genius goes to? Because I saw this with little snitch. They make a network to connection to somebody called Fresh Clam. Oh, nice. So I think they're using their database. Oh, cool. But hey, that's fine. That's smart. Yeah. You know, why build your own malware database if somebody else already has it? Just license somebody else's. Yeah, no, that's guys do. That's totally normal. The malware scanning that happens in the Deco routers, the TP-Link mesh routers goes to Trend Micro for theirs. I mean, there's nothing wrong with leveraging a good database like that. I think that's great. Yeah. That's the thing that still tickles me about little snitch is, oh, I see what you're doing. Yeah. Cool. All right. Moving on. We have had sort of an ongoing discussion about notifications when tasks complete. And listener Aaron wrote in, this is over the past couple of weeks I've been listening to this. And the method I've been using for a couple of years is actually built in to Mac OS, which helps me meet my favorite criteria free as in beer. The tip is to let your Mac talk to you when it's got something important to say any alert style notification that stays on screen for a specified amount of time can be spoken. You can also adjust what prefix is used to start the verbal notification. The defaults are alert attention, excuse me and pardon me, that you can add more. I've added, hey Aaron, or choose random for even more fun. Coupled with the control over notifications and your preferences, you can limit or expand your spoken alerts quite a bit. Using the bash command osascript display notification, you can also send your own notifications from any utility. Be sure to change the notification preference for script editor to be an alert to where is this magic setting in accessibility preferences inside system preferences, accessibility preferences, speech, just enable announcements and click the options button to adjust the phrase used in the delay before speaking. And that's the key. If you don't want it speaking every alert that pops up immediately, set the delay to say, you know, you can set it from anywhere between zero and 60 seconds. And that will let you, you know, decide, okay, if it's been on screen for more than, say, 15 seconds. All right, now's a good time. I'm not here to dismiss it. Now tell me, and then I can get closer. So very cool, Aaron. I like that. I had totally forgotten that was there. Totally, totally. Good stuff, huh, man? Yeah, more good stuff. Go. Just a quick update here. I just launched our friend clam here and they have a menu item saying launch clam xav century. I'm going to guess that that's a real time scanning component of it. Okay. I don't have it set up that way. And you have to go in there and tell it which folders to watch. Um, so I guess, well, obviously real time scanning takes some it does processing. Yeah. But they give you an ability to fine tune it. So yeah, what it looks like is you can choose which folders it does. So like, you could use your downloads folder, for example, where it's just going to watch anything that's added there and automatically scan that. And that probably makes sense. Yeah. Because, um, you know, there's all these people, we had someone right in and I redirected them. They're like, yeah, I accidentally installed a flash update, which probably wasn't a flash update. Yeah. That's actually what I did when I, when I, when I want to fish around for malware is I'll actually go to, uh, I'll search for a recent episode of a certain show. Sure. TV show. And then you find all these kind of uh, disreputable sites that claim they let you have it. And invariably they offer to let you do a flash player update with malware built in. That's awesome. Right. That's a great idea. I should do that to test some of these routers. I like that. Oh yeah. Some of these definitely because they should say they should alert. Yeah. Don't, don't go there. Bad, bad, bad. That's right. Pretty good. All right. I think we got time to do a couple more of these tips. John, uh, I will, I will play the one that you prepped from our friend Everett unless there's anything else. Yeah. I think I got it right too. I like it. Look at this. Yeah, here we go. Hello, John and Dave. I have feedback for the gentleman who picked successfully or he thought paired his Apple TV remote with his second generation Apple TV. So the process of pairing the Apple article is correct. You hold down the menu and the forward button to pair. However, to unpair and this works with any Apple TV remote, you hold down menu and the left button and that'll unpair any and all remotes that are paired with your TV. Then to repair, you hold down the right and menu. So the reason that his remote started working is that he essentially told it to accept all infrared from all Apple TV remotes to repair, i.e. one to one connection instead of a one to any connection which he currently has, then he'd hold down the menu and the right button. Any hoot just thought out, explain this. I ran into this a little bit ago and it actually is the same procedure with your MacBook Pro back when they had the IR receiver. Any hoot. I hope this is helpful and I'll cut myself off here. Ouch. Thanks, Everett. That's always fun riding the EQ trying to find where the road noise is. But that is a handy tip. So thanks for that, Everett. And stuff. Here's an opportunity for shenanigans as well. Yeah, man. So both my machines have the IR port, my 2012 MacBook Pro and my 2014 Mac Mini, though I think as he pointed out, a lot of the most recent machines I do not believe have an infrared port. But here's the fun thing that you can do, and I did this back in the day in the corporate space here, is that if you have a machine that isn't... So the advice here is pair your remote with something. Otherwise, what we used to do is you could put someone's machine to sleep. If you hold down certain keys on the remote, it's hilarious. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's pretty good. I like it. And you'd be like, why is my machine going to sleep? Why is it? Yeah, right. Right. Oh, it's good. That's good. Cool. All right. A tip from Jeremy, sort of a tale of woe that turns into a tip. He was the one that needed to transfer emails from one Office 365 account to another. He said, after doing that, I noticed that all the emails now have the received date as of the date they were transferred. This means that, for example, emails I received in 2008 now have a received date of yesterday. Investigation tells me that mail has been doing this since at least 2009. It doesn't look as though the original received date is in the metadata. And therefore, I flag this up so that others, unlike me, don't get caught. So he's totally right about this, by the way. And I got to say, I have always hated the concept of a received date in mail because, to me, it seems... Maybe there's other people with your workflows, it works. But the received date is when I retrieved that message from the server and got it. It has nothing to do with when it was actually sent to me. And I find sent date far more relevant. So here's the deal. If you want, you can go into mail. And if you go into the view menu, go to columns, and you'll see that in those columns you have lots of things that you can choose. And this is just sort of, as an aside, a great little tip to customize and perhaps declutter your mail window. But date received can be turned off and date sent can be turned on. And in most of these cases, the date sent, even when you move messages around, can, will be preserved. I have had an experience where it's not. So I have a date in February of 2008 where I have all kinds of emails that are dated that day, and it drives me crazy, but that's just because I screwed things up on my own. But far more often than not, that date sent is going to be preserved because it is in the headers of the message, because it's put there by the sender. So to me, that's the solution to this problem. When I'm setting up a Mac new, it is one of the first things that I do for myself. I mean, I don't necessarily impose this on others, but I want to make everybody aware of it. That's how I deal with it. What do you think, Mr. Braun? I think I haven't had run into that problem in a while. Yeah, there you go. That's how it's done. All right, we got a couple more here. While we're on the subject of date formats, listener Ken wrote in. He said, I'm trying to think of how to couch this. So on your Mac, and it's true in mail, it's true in the finder. There are many places where dates are displayed in listings and things like that. And there are multiple different formats for these. In fact, there are four and you can customize them. If you go into system preferences, date and time, go to languages and languages and region, go to advanced and then go to dates. Right there, you will see four different formats, short, medium, long and full. Each of these can be customized and it's right there in front of you with all the examples and everything that you would need to truly tweak these things. And the great part is you get to pick how you want all of this to appear. And like, for example, the medium date format shows three letter month, day, year. The full date format shows the full day, like Thursday or whatever, you know, Sunday spelled out, August spelled out, and then the number and then the year, the date, the day number and the year. But you can change that if you want, even in the full date format, if you don't need it to take up all that extra space, you can change it to the three-letter day, like, you know, sun for Sunday or through for Thursday. You can do the same for the month. And you can start to tweak this stuff so that even when you're seeing full dates, it shrinks stuff down. Applications choose which format they're going to use, you get to choose how each of those formats appears. That's a really cool little tip, Ken. I appreciate that. Again, it's system preferences, date and time, click on the languages and region button, click on the advanced button, and click on dates. And I think Jeff Butts might be writing this up for us at TMO this week. So I'm looking forward to that. But yeah. Good, good stuff. Have you ever messed around with this before, John? All right. All right. Well, and then another one from Ken that I think falls into cool stuff found. He says, I don't use screenshots at all. I use Snappy. And I really like it. Snappy version 2 came out last month and it works great. Syncing with iOS devices works a lot better. It's easy to resize all the snaps and a lot easier to customize them. And all the pics that he included in his email are from Snappy, so he can mark them up and he kind of put little little things on there. And it's it's handy. So Snappy as a screenshot tool. Thanks, Ken. Um, you know, I feel like as much fun as we're having here, John, the band's getting antsy outside. So I think we got to let them in. What do you think? Hmm. You know, I do have a, yeah. Oh, okay. Formats. Yeah, there you go. Well, you know, we had that question about, yeah, I don't, if you go to that section, make sure that your settings are consistent for the country that you're a language and region. Well, okay. Because that has a place where you can set these things. We've had some people write in. Sometimes you'll see things on your screen and some of the characters are kind of weird. Make sure that your preferred language is the language that you speak and the region that you have set is where you actually are. Otherwise, things may make it crazy. Oh, yeah. I forgot that all this was in here too. And the, in the languages and region page of that. Yeah. Things we, we had somebody write in and he's like, you know, I'm seeing a pound or percent 20 and a percent 40 in my stuff. And why is that? And I'm like, it could be because you don't have the right region or language set. Right. Good news is that the Mac supports lots of regions and languages. The bad news is that if it's not set up right, huh. So I was on United States custom for whatever reason there. And I have now changed. There's two United States options. One that just says United States and another that says United States parentheses computer. And the difference that I'm seeing is there is no and the one that's listed as computer, there is no comma in currency or there's no comma in numbers when you get to, you know, thousands or millions or anything like that. It's just, you know, straight. So I am changing that. That's weird. Oh, I know. I'm looking in the America's list and I see United States and United States. Well, first you go to America's. But yeah, I see United States and United States parentheses. Yeah. Well, I know I am on custom because I just changed my dates while we were in there instead of being, you know, long day. I shortened that because while we were talking about it. So that's why I'm on custom. But that's interesting. You can set the 24 hour time here and all that good stuff. And there's so many different places you can tweak things. You can change your temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius, if you like. No, you can go oven. No, Kelvin. No, Kelvin got the Kelvin Kelvin was left out in the cold. Come on. That's pretty good, man. Okay. All right. I think from there we got to move on. Good stuff. Let's see what else we have to tell you about. We told you premium folks how to email us, but we didn't tell anybody else. Feedback at MacGeekab.com is the address to which you're going to send all of that good stuff. Yep. That's feedback at MacGeekab.com. Feedback at MacGeekab.com, I believe is what you said. Yeah, you know. Find us on Twitter. Go to Twitter.com slash MacGeekab. You can follow him at Twitter.com slash John F. Braun, me at Dave Hamilton pilot Pete. I've been thinking about like we might, I got to get Pete back involved here and it's scheduling is the problem. I think Sunday mornings are really bad for Pete. So I don't know. I miss that guy. I miss having him here for the show too. So Pete, we miss you. Let's figure it out, man. I need you back. It's good to have you. Big thanks to everybody that helped out in the show notes today. Everybody in the chat room MacGeekab.com slash stream and Brian and Jeff and anybody else who was helping craft handcraft the show notes. I know you did it with love and we appreciate it. It's awesome. I want to thank cash fly CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I want to thank of course all our sponsors in the podcast marketplace. That's smile at smile software.com slash geek other world computing at max sales.com bare bones software at bare bones.com. We've got a couple more coming that I can tell you about next week. Good stuff. It'll be a fun fall. Enjoy yourselves. Have fun out there here in New England. The weather has been blissful. Perfect. I feel bad for everybody down in Texas that's dealing with this hurricane. Please stay safe. Have fun, but don't get caught.