 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, Episode 758 for Monday, April 22nd, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where we take all your questions, all your tips, all your cool stuff found, all of that stuff, and we mix it all together and, you know, loosely form it into an agenda. We try to tell a story, but mostly we try to make sure that every single one of us, you and me included, learns at least five new things every single time we get together doing what I like to call our communal head scratching, right? You know, we just, we take these things, we ponder them. Sometimes we have the answers. Sometimes you have the answers and we share them on your behalf. You know, it's just we get together and we do this communal head scratch again to learn at least five new things. That's for this episode. Include otherworldcomputing at macsales.com. We'll talk about their new Aura Pro X2 NVMe flash SSDs and also malware bytes for Mac. Because malware bytes for Mac can do some wonderful things for you. As we've been talking about on the show for a long time, we'll talk more about it a little bit later here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? Eh. Just eh? Good. That's kind of dreary. Ah, yes. Yeah. It's it's it's the April showers time of the year here in New England. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, we'll get past it. What's that? Flash flood season. Oh, that's not good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now we get them on the coast here. Yeah. Pretty regularly. Yeah. Far enough away, fortunately. That is true that you are far enough away or fortunately far enough away. But you're really only like a block or two away from where the flood line generally hits, right? Oh, when when we had Sandy, the water got to the street, the closest side street to me. Pretty scary. Yeah, that's that's pretty scary. I agree. That's a little too close for comfort. The tide. Yeah, the tide was coming up and then it came back in. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The last minute. Yeah. Well, we'll say hello to Kenny on the well in the chat room on the Jersey shore. Of course, the chat room is at Mackie Cub dot com slash stream. The Jersey shore is south of both John and I because he says he's sitting on his deck in the sunshine listening. If you want to join the chat room while we record Mackie Cub dot com slash stream is where that is. And you can join us at Mackie Cub dot com slash calendar to find out when all that will happen. I think the calendar is still working. There's some weirdness going on with with calendar lately though. So we'll we'll get there. But we have some follow ups and some questions and some tips and all of that good stuff. And we're going to start with something from listener Chris who asks. I think I have this right. Maybe I thought I did. You know, I put the wrong Chris in here, didn't I, John? You know, this is what happens sometimes sometimes on a on a Sunday morning and we'll we'll get there. Chris asks. He says. In episode 757, you were talking about your favorite apps that apps that must have apps that you would install on a new Mac. He said, how can you not have a password manager as your number one pick for a new Mac? Neither one of you listed a password manager. And he says, and I know you both use them. Without that, I'd not be able to sign into any of the other great apps that you mentioned. And you're right. A password manager is vital in today's world. And for me, certainly it was it was an oversight, right? These are these are the things that we we take for granted, right? And it's that's how it works. That's why we put the call out to all of you. That said, iCloud Keychain is a pretty good password manager. It's not great, but it's it's gotten way better. And it it is for I would say for many people, if maybe not most listeners here, but many listeners here, it is enough. Certainly, I recommend you use it a hundred percent of you use it even if you're also using another password manager like one password or last pass or something like that. I run I run one password that's been running that for a very long time since before iCloud Keychain existed. But I also run iCloud Keychain because well up until iOS 12, the integration of password managers and Safari on iOS was not optimal. And so it just kept two databases and they really did keep each other in sync. It wasn't it's not a big deal to manage. And even with iOS 12, there are times where I find it handy to have access to both of them, you know, at my fingertips, so to speak. So so yeah, there you go. Thoughts on that, John? Last pass for me. Do you use iCloud Keychain? No. Interesting. Interesting. And I guess now with iOS 12, you can mostly survive, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it integrates nicely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. No. Good suggestion. Yeah. It probably is one of the first things that I install. He's right. Yeah, sure. Because I need passwords. We need our passwords. Sometimes I don't even know what they are, you know. Right. Right. Yeah. I think that's why I like having iCloud Keychain running sort of in parallel as a backup, if you will, because if I am on a Mac and one password isn't running or, you know, isn't installed or something, like I know my passwords will be compatible with any Apple device that I'm going to use. Like no question doesn't matter. I know they're there, even though for the most part I use one password to invoke them most of the time. So yeah, good question, Chris. And good addition to the list. And make sure to send yours in feedback at mackeycap.com. Did you say feedback at mackeycap.com? I didn't say feedback at mackeycap.com. One other thing I would like to ask a favor. I know we asked this from time to time, but if you would, go to mackeycap.com slash iTunes. And then you've got to click a couple of times because it's how Apple does it. But that's as close as we can get you, mackeycap.com slash iTunes. And then just go leave us a review. And if you've left us a review in the past, good news, you can update it. And that actually helps us when your review is updated or when a new review is posted. It really does help. And we would appreciate it. It makes things good. It makes things pop up on iTunes. That brings in more listeners. That brings in more questions and more answers and all of that good stuff. So, please leave us reviews. Yeah, it would be good. All right. Douglas has a question. And that one I do have ready to go here. Douglas says, he has several questions. We'll see where we get. He says, we'll start with number one. He says, a friend is migrating from Windows to Mac and moving his data over the only snag we've hit is mail. He was using Windows live mail. Unfortunately, he was using a pop account. So, the email files exist only on his local volume in .eml format. So, we need to find a way to get them into macOS mail. The only solution I can find requires purchasing commercial conversion software. Is there an easier way to import EML files into the Mac? We'll start there and then he's got a couple others. We'll probably get to the second one too. EML files should be readable by mail. As I understand it, they are individual email files similar to the way mail stores mail and EML X files. So, I think mail will read them. I found a post on Stack Exchange. I didn't have any EML files here to test with. But I found a post on Stack Exchange that talks about putting these EML files just into folders and then telling mail to slurp those folders in. And I think that will do it. It stands to reason that it would. Although, like I said, I'm unable to test it. John, do you have any experience with any of this or thoughts about it or research or anything like that? No, I mean, I'm looking. So, in mail, you get two choices here. If you say import, import from Apple Mail. Sure. Or files in Mbox format. So, you got to import mailboxes, right? And then, yeah, files in Mbox format and then just point the thing at your folder and slurp it in. I think that will work. Yeah. I think it's going to look at those folders and slurp through it. Yeah. Because Mbox format, I mean, Mbox is a format, but I've done that to import folders of EML X files before and that has definitely worked. So, I think that label in macOS mail's import engine might be a bit of a misnomer. Yeah. I think you're right because I'm digging here. So, Mbox, I think within the Mbox files, let me just drill down here. Never mind. But yeah, I'm pretty sure it's an E of the whatever file when you get down to it and Mbox is a container for that. Correct. Yeah. Well, it's both, right? Mbox can be the folder with the EML X files, which is what Apple uses now. But Apple moved to that because of Spotlight so that they would have individual files to index for each message and then you could pull up things in Spotlight. That was the catalyst to that. Prior to that though, Apple used what I would call sort of classic Mbox format, which is where each mailbox, like inbox would be one cent, would be another, et cetera, et cetera. Each mailbox was its own Mbox file, which is like a Unix thing. It's not a package or anything like that. It's just one big long file of every message that's in there. As I remember it, it's been a while. But I think Udora did the same thing. I think it's stored in what I'll call classic Mbox format. But I think Mail will import all of these things that we've discussed. Yeah. All right. The second one from Douglas here is, he says, Dave, you are a OnePassword user. He says, I use OnePassword with a purchased license, not a subscription. He says, I've been syncing my OnePassword files via Dropbox. I would now like to switch and sync through iCloud. First of all, do you recommend that or would you recommend staying with Dropbox? And number two, if I switch to iCloud, what is the best way to do so, making sure all my vaults are transferred? So I'm in the same boat as you. You're right. I use OnePassword, as I said before, and I do currently sync that with Dropbox. But I keep considering moving that to iCloud syncing for two reasons. Number one, I've got a bunch of storage in iCloud that I'm paying for anyway, and I might as well use it. But number two, and this is just a theory. I have not confirmed this, but actually now that we're doing this segment, I'll send this to the folks at OnePassword and get an answer here, because my question to you at OnePassword is, I think, I know that with Dropbox, the only time my vault syncs is if I launch the OnePassword app. So if all I'm doing is navigating around in Safari, on iOS, on Mac, it's syncing all the time. But on iOS, it seems to me like it only syncs if I launch the OnePassword app, which means if I've changed some passwords or updated things or added things and I don't launch the OnePassword app, I don't get those, and those changes aren't there until I launch the app and let it run for a few seconds where it can go connect to Dropbox and sync. iCloud syncing, of course, happens at the OS level in the background. So I'm wondering if OnePassword can process those sync changes also in the background, or if I'm still going to have to launch the app to do it. But either way, I've been thinking about switching, and I've looked into this, and it's pretty straightforward. You just move it on one machine and then attach the others there. You just go into... I mean, on your Mac, you would launch OnePassword. You would go to Preferences in the OnePassword menu, and then you'd go to Sync, and you'll have all your vaults listed there, and it'll say Sync, this vault, whatever the name of it is, with Dropbox, and you can change it to a folder, so you could sync it with something else, although test that to make sure something else syncs things in a way that OnePassword is okay with it. But sync it with Dropbox or sync with iCloud. Once you move that, then just go to your other devices and move that, and in theory, I think that's all you need to do. I have done this with other people, and it has worked fine. Does your last pass sync, John, with iCloud, or are you using something else? I think I'm syncing with them. Oh, right, that's right. Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's right. I forgot about that. Yeah, they've always been the cloud thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, cool. Any more on that? Are we good? We're good. All right, so for people that are migrating or have last pass and want to migrate to another platform, there really is no, you just launch it and log into your account and you're good to go. That's also the way OnePassword currently works. If you have a OnePassword subscription, it's the same sort of thing. You're syncing with their cloud and it just happens and all of that. So we'll get some answers from them on how this works because that would be good to know, where the benefits are. Especially on iOS, having that data always at your fingertips, always up to date is the key and I want to find out if we can have that. Do you know if that happens with last pass on iOS or do you have to launch the app in order to get changes to follow through? I do not know. Okay, fair. Well, we'll look into this. This is a good little thread to tug on a little bit here. Mike has a question. He says, I'm following up on the Wi-Fi problems, some Wi-Fi problems that I've been having. He says, I've been trying different combinations of devices to see if I can nail down what's causing my connections to drop. He says, so far the most stable setup I have is to have my access point radios completely off. So he has a Verizon router as his router and then he has been using, I think we talked about him in a previous episode using TP-Link 802.11n only extender as an router but in bridge mode as an access point. And he says, with turning those off, that solves the problem. He says, my Wi-MOS switches are able to connect. Everything stays online. I'm not having problems with my Tivo or Netflix refusing to play. He says, of course, the main issue is coverage. Now that I've turned off my effective extender, he says, I don't have coverage in the rooms where I want to have it. He says, I have marginal signal. And he says, I figured my Verizon router would cover most of the house with 2G Wi-Fi. He says, so I turned the 5G off at the Verizon router and turned 5G back on on the TP-Link access point. So this is now turning off the 802.11ac Wi-Fi on the main router and turning the 802.11n 5GHz Wi-Fi on the extender. He says, I set the power to low because I can since it's very close to all the seating in there and that's what he wants to get to. He says, everything still seems good. No network devices are dropping or anything. And this is an interesting thing, right? Because he's using some of the principles that we've talked about here, especially where you can setting the power level to not spill past where you want it to spill past and that way devices aren't going to be hopping unnecessarily back and forth between your access points. Some mesh systems will do this automatically for you. Most will not. Most do just consumer grade mesh anyway, just broadcast it 100% and that's that. And so you can oversaturate your house with some of this stuff. So you just need to be aware. And he says, I followed your suggestions on the show using Wi-Fi Explorer. He says, I have a version of NetSpot at netspotapp.com. He says, I found a blueprint of our house and I loaded it into NetSpot. From room to room, surveying the Wi-Fi with many combinations of 2G and 5G, being off and on, et cetera, et cetera. And he says several of the surveys showed no 5G at all, wherever I was. He says, so I'm skeptical whether the access points are even working correctly. He says, but as you suggested, simpler seems to be better. He says, so for now I'm running with the one router on 2 GHz only and the access point with 5 GHz only on low power and that seems to be working. He had an issue with his Wemo plugs and they would work but then they would fall off. And I think those Wemo plugs, like most smart home devices, even a lot of cameras are 2 GHz only. So I think that explains maybe why his Wemo devices were jumping back and forth and maybe getting confused if there was too much signal for them. So he might be able to turn 5 GHz back on on his Verizon box, but the problem with that is now you're running two different flavors of 5 GHz. You've got N and AC, so better to have extenders, all of your access points, at least supporting the same protocols so that when devices jump from one to the other, there's not potential confusion, although maybe I'm making something out of nothing here. Any thoughts on this, Mr. Braun? No, good analysis doing a site survey. Yeah, that really is. That's the thing you want to do, is use something like, I mean, he's using NetSpot, which is really what's built for this, to go around and see and log where he's seeing which signals, how strong they are, and then deciding where to place things and being very intentional and strategic about it. I like this, this is good. We all should be so diligent, Mike, because I'm sure, I know at times I've had my house set up where I'm just over-bathing in Wi-Fi and actually causing problems. Earlier, late last year, I guess maybe not earlier this year, but yeah, I don't know, the last few months, I was having some recurring problems and it was like, I need to thin things out here, and I did and it was like, oh, look, everything got better. If I do better, I just do as I say, not as we do. We have to experiment here and learn, and sometimes that means breaking stuff, but then we get to share. One other option that could be used in a scenario like Mike is talking about here is to use a separate SSID. It could be from a completely separate router, it could be if your router supports it, the same router just sharing a different SSID and have that only be a 2 GHz SSID and only coming from one place, and then that way you attach all of your smart home devices to that, they won't be jumping around and having this problem that potentially was happening with his WiIMO devices and that can simplify things without negatively impacting your ability to connect to, say, 5 GHz when you're near the Verizon router or whatever, just offloading those things. It can, if you want to simplify, that can definitely work. And some mesh routers will let you change your 2.4 GHz SSID, I know the Linksys Vellop ones will. I think the Orbi does, they keep changing things in their firmware, but I'm pretty sure you can sort of manually manage that, and that can be a handy thing too. Yeah, good. Anything more on this, John? Yeah? Okay. You know, before we've got, we're sort of dipping into this smart home realm, before we do that, I want to take a minute, if I can take a minute, John, and talk about our first sponsor, yeah? Sure. All right, sweet. I want to talk about other world computing here. OWC's got their new Aura Pro X2 NVMe Flash SSDs. These things, like, this is what you can get for your older Mac to add blazing fast SSDs, like, up to twice as fast as the original. Up to 3200 megabytes per second read, 2400 megabytes per second write, they go up to 2 terabytes, write 16 times greater capacity, right? You know, and they consume less power and run cooler than older models, but here's the thing. You get to keep your same Mac with this faster SSD, with this bigger SSD. Your keyboard, all of your ports, right? I know how it is. John likes his ports. Well, guess what? You can now upgrade your SSD, get some real boost out of that thing while keeping all of your stuff. Your keyboard, your Mac, your ports, just more space and speed. And you got to check it out. Go to macsales.com. You know, the beauty of Mac sales is they are like us, right? That's why this product is able to exist because they have all the same experiences that we do. They are Mac users. They understand this. They've been Mac users longer than many of us have been Mac users. They've been longer, Mac users longer than a lot of us have been alive, right? They know this stuff. In this world, and that's why they're able to do this, but they also understand how it works and all of that stuff. It's why it's the first place I go if I need to buy, you know, something to expand or enhance my Mac because I know if OWC offers it and I get it from them, I know that it's going to work. They, you know, they make this stuff this way. So you got to check it out. Otherworldcomputing at macsales.com and of course, our thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Let's see. Smart home time, shall we? Let's go to, let's go to, no. Yeah, it's good. Smart home is fun. Jeff has a question and I, this is great because it's going to open some doors for us. He says, with HomeKit, I'm pretty entrenched into the Apple ecosystem and my condo is littered with Apple HomeKit compatible devices. He says, I have automation set up on my phone that basically says when I turn on the bedroom neutron light switch, it turns on my bedroom hue bulbs, right? And if it's a specific time of day, they turn on it a specific color. The question is, if my iPhone is not at home and I'm at work and the light switch is used, how is this automation still working? Where are the automation rules being stored? He says, sure, I have an Apple TV 4K, but Apple claims this is needed only for controlling devices outside your home network. Is it also storing the automation rules when my iPhone is not at home and the light switch is used? So, yes, this is the answer. And this is a good thing to think about when you're looking at home automation, right? It's possible to do all your home automation with Bluetooth, right? And if, as long as your phone or some other device is there, everything can work, but as soon as you take that device out, like your phone, it doesn't happen. But you can still have the devices, right? So a hub is a device that does two different things or can do two different things. Often they're in the same device. One function of a hub is to connect to devices that aren't Wi-Fi compatible, right? If you've got, like you said, your hue bulbs, I can't remember if your Lutron switches are Wi-Fi compatible, like the LIFX bulbs are. The Philips Hue bulbs aren't. They use ZigBee or something else, right? And you need a hub for them to connect to. Once you have that hub, that connects it to your network, right? To either Wi-Fi or Ethernet. So that's the hub doing one job, you know, routing between what you have and what they are. The other job of a hub is to be that always-on server, if you will, managing your automation. And also sending out notifications if things happen when you're not home and all of that. But that's part of automation, right? And yes, your Apple TV is being your hub. And you can figure out if you have a home kit hub in your house. Your home kit devices will work without one, but like you said, only if your iPhone is there. But you can look, launch the home app on your phone. I think actually you can do it on your Mac if you're running Mojave, I'm pretty sure this is all there. But on your phone, go to the home, which on your phone is at the bottom left icon. Then in the upper left is a picture of your A house, not your house, but tap that little icon. And then it'll show you some details about your house, what people are attached to it, some other stuff. And one of the things near the top is going to be a section called home hubs. If you have one or more devices that can be a home hub, they will be listed there. And it will show you which one is the quote unquote master. And a home hub can be, as you noted, an Apple TV or a home pod. Yep. Or an iPad can actually be set up this way. Oddly, not yet a Mac. So, you know, there you go. But an iPad can be set as a home hub. You need it plugged in or at least powered all the time. So you figure that part out. But then yeah, you can have an iPad always on that's doing the home hub functionality. Apple TV will automatically do it. Home pod will automatically do it. And they vote amongst one another to decide who is, if you have more than one, to decide who is the master. I've had a scenario where that got screwed up and I had to like unplug things for an hour to let it all settle out so they could re-vote properly. But anyway, yeah, that's it. We'll put a link in the show notes too, an article about that. But yeah, so yes. Now with that foundation, your Apple TV is your home kit hub. It's taking care of all the automation. Generally speaking, it's taking care of the automation even when you're home because it can and there's no reason to burden your iPhone with this. But certainly when you're not home, you know, your Apple TV is there doing its thing and it can alert you to different things and you can also then send controls to it as long as it has proper access to the internet and all of that. You can send controls to it and it will, you know, turn your lights on and off or whatever you want to do. Yeah, see cameras if they are home kit compatible cameras. I started messing with HomeKit again this week, John. With all our talk about it, I installed HomeBridge again on my Synology so that all of my non-HomeKit compatible devices could be populated. And you know what, it's really not that big of a pain in the neck. The worst part is that when you install HomeBridge you have to load the plugins for all of the devices that you might have and if you miss one, it just won't see that device and so it's not like a smart thing where if the device was HomeKit compatible it just magically sort of shows up or you just scan it and you go. I forgot to add my TP-Link switches and it's like, oh, I gotta go get the HomeKit, the HomeBridge TP-Link plugin and I gotta tell it to load that when HomeBridge launches. So it's a little bit wonky for sure. But you know what, once you get it up and running it's pretty stable and it is kind of cool having all those devices on HomeKit. But that's not my main hub, at least not currently. I'm still using Stringify as my main automation hub, which is a cloud-based unit. But as we discussed, that's going away. But you've been messing with hubs, John. Any thoughts about this before we get into your hub messing? Nope. Yeah, you may want to consider a different one because I just switched over. So it was Friday and I go into my TV room and I ask Yuna who would return on the lights and her reply was, yeah, your Wink Hub is offline or not plugged in. So I can't do that. That's so nice. I'm like, yeah. It's like monthly outages now. I don't want to deal with that. As I told you, I bought a smart thing. So I'm like, which is a Samsung product. Right. I bought one of those. I'm like, you know what, I'm going to bring everybody over. Well, I have now, like six bulbs and those are ZigBee and then I got three thermostats that are Z-Wave and it supports both those protocols. So the hardest part was unpairing and repairing everything. It wasn't that hard either. On the bulbs, typically you do some sort of on-off pattern and it'll then blink or pulse when it's in pairing mode. And then you tell the app and then I told the smart things. The only thing that was kind of weird though, the bulbs I have are Cree bulbs or most of them are Cree bulbs and it has an explicit entry. It's like, hey, you want to add a device? Okay, go for it. And it's sitting there and sitting there and sitting there and it never paired and I'm like, well, that's stupid. Here's how you solve that problem. The thing is when you see a list of supported devices in either of the apps whether it be the Wink app or the smart things app, a lot of times you can choose something else and this is actually how I solve the problem. So I'm like, you know what, let me pick something more generic and I think I pick smart things so they also make sensors. Sure. I'm like, you know what, let me choose that and it was like, oh yeah, I found your Cree bulb or oh yeah, I found your thermostat. That makes sense. So that was the only hitch but there's a nothing really changed as far as the commands that I issued to you know who because there's a smart things skill in addition to a Wink skill. So nothing changed. This is a great thing to sort of circle back on what we were saying with Jeff here. Your smart things hub in its current setup is being used as the first kind of hub we discussed. The bridge to devices that can't otherwise connect to your network and that's great, right? I mean you need that and obviously when you don't have that things don't work. So moving from Wink to smart things for that, great. But you are not currently smart things as your automation hub or an automation hub. You can certainly run multiples although you know I thought you said you were using the Amazon A-Lady as your automation hub. See what I'm saying, so there's two different uses. Well the thing is I also assigned some so I had to define some actions for strips and that's within the smart things app and the smart things service. So yeah the other thing I had to do was set up a smart things account just like you have to set up a Wink account or I guess yeah okay. You don't set up a home kit account that well I mean you do it's connected to your iCloud account and all of that like Apple does. But okay so you're doing some automation through your smart things configured by the smart things app but handled by the smart things service which is a cloud service that talks to your smart things hub. Right so they have so you can in the app here so you can say add device add scene which I haven't done that yet add automation and I actually added a bunch that I had on the other side which is basically to at certain times of day set each of the thermostats either up or down. Got it. Okay so do you do it so I just I want to make sure we shine this light properly for everybody out there in the Amazon A lady app that you could launch you can set up your skills which are linked to your devices but you can also set routines which is their version of automations just like in the home kit app the bottom phone the bottom right icon is automation right so you can have these things and you can have automations running in from multiple places hopefully you remember where they each are because if you need to tweak one or turn it on then you have them and you know as I just described three different places that can be a little bit crazy but what I'm curious about with now that you're on smart things is everybody has told me and told us that smart things really is certainly one of the best automation hubs out there because it's so flexible right this is what we loved about stringify except now it's going away because stringify was fairly easy to use but but very flexible in terms of you know I could have multiple triggers and it could be a time of day and you know if there's motion and if that lights on right you know and so you can have all these things trigger in and that's great a the Amazon ladies triggers will do some of that but but really generally only two things and home kit will do two things as long as one of them is time of day otherwise it's only you get one sensor and and one and then a series of actions but you can only have you know one sensor plus a time of day if you want whereas smart things I think certainly there's and there's there's several ways to go there's the smart things app but then there's something that Samsung or smart things calls web core W E B C O R E and that's a far more detailed way of interacting with the smart things automation stuff and so what I'm curious about with you now is what other things from your smart home life like you needed your smart things hub to talk to your bulbs okay but that's not the end of the things your smart things hub can talk to I'm curious can it take a trigger say from your nest camera drop can can it take a trigger from your ring doorbell right because that's a cool thing I for example I have and this is doing those good it knows about ring it doesn't see my drop cam because it's not a real IP camera but neither is your ring right ring it's seeing through the ring service yes yes and so could it could you link it somehow so that it sees your drop cam through the drop cam service right just like Amazon's a lady does yeah exactly yeah they had a hack at some point anymore because then you can do things like like I'm doing you know where it's like my ring driveway motion sensor sees motion if it's between midnight and 6 a.m. I wanted to turn these three lights on at you know and set them to orange so that my driveway has some light but it's not super bright it's this orange kind of softer light and I and then 10 minutes later I wanted to turn it off and and I actually can do that I was doing with stringify now Amazon added a weight function to routines on the lady app so I could do it there and home kit does have a weight and then turn these things off function that's been a little bit wonky for me but probably because I'm you know ring isn't I'm linking ring through home bridge so maybe that's why that hasn't been reliable but yeah that's where cool yeah yeah I register the ring and it does have a motion entry yeah so if I wanted to do something saying okay if you see motion then you do this or that sure sure the other neat thing that this environment has that the wink didn't is that um my thermostats are battery powered when I put them in the wink environment it didn't it wasn't able to report or sense the battery level doesn't smart things oh nice okay so yes and this is a funny thing right like it the API for in this case your thermostats it has all kinds of things but your previous hub only tied into you know the whoever wrote the plugin only chose to tie into a couple of those things whoever wrote the plugin for smart things decided to use a couple more and that's where things get you know super interesting yeah yeah because I figured you know this should be available I mean I can you know I can punch the buttons on the thermostat and it'll tell me what the battery level is so you know why can't the API I don't know but um so I created another action saying okay if the um if the battery level is below 10% then let me know so I can yeah okay and where did you put that action is that on your smart things or did you put that in Alexa sorry hey lady trying not to trigger everybody's homes now yep yeah I just created another uh automation within the environment yeah okay in smart things yes got it yeah and also here is cool is that they have a whole bunch of ones that uh people have uh people have written that like coordinate your devices for example if you leave the house it'll lock the door it's like oh that's a good idea yeah right okay yeah so this is where it gets another one um if let me know if inclement weather is coming and the windows are open because you can get a I guess you know sensors to say whether your windows are open or closed oh smart like yeah I mean they got a whole bunch or you can like I said make your own so um sorry wink I mean um and someone one listener actually forwarded an article where um I forgot who wrote it but um it was basically saying we can't recommend wink anymore for a number of reasons my reason now is the outages like that's a pretty good reason you know the other thing the other weird thing is that try to buy one try to buy a wink hub to I wasn't the only one I found is that somebody on the Amazon is selling one for like 200 sure sure the retail price on it is $99 but um there's a concern wink wink might be going out of business here right I mean if they're not selling hubs and they're not keeping their service reliable so I would I would think maybe that's that yeah yeah I mean it was a good run it's a you know capable product and supports you know generic things but um yeah I mean if their service isn't reliable um yeah yeah that's a yeah sorry guys so Alex in the chat room asked a question I think this is the question he's asking um he says is smart thing something that works with home kit and I believe the answer to that is is definitively no it is not a native home kit supported device however I am 99% certain that there is a home bridge plug-in for smart things so you could tie that into home kit if you want to use home kit to manage your house and all of that uh you can tie that in and and you know there's nothing wrong like I don't think I'm going to standardize on on home kit as my automation hub but I will continue to run home bridge because it's it's handy to at least have the option of using Siri or you know the home app not only on my phone but other people's phones in the house to control these devices because you're not limited to just one thing being able to control it to your point John right you are your smart things hub but you also have your Amazon a lady and and that can either be a smart thing smart things or not depending on how it has to work that can also control things right so so it you know other than the headache of maintaining the the connection in the service especially with home bridge where there's a little bit of headache there there's no reason not to have multiple things out there um going so and we'll talk about more of this stuff in fact I do want to share one thing listener Chris sent in we were talking had an email going back and forth about smart things and web core because you have the smart things app which is mostly you know it's it's functional and then but it's limited because it's you know meant to be used by by anyone that buys this thing and then there's web core which really is you know you don't need to be a programmer to use it but you kind of need to be able to think in terms of logic flow and things like that to you know make it work and that would be more than many people would want so they keep web core separate although all works with the same hub there's an app out there called smart rules at smart rules app.com that it seems like uses web core but gives it a simpler phone based graphical interface so if you have things hub John web smart rules might be a good app to check out and I think it's available for free with in-app purchases I'm not sure there's probably you know you can have a couple of scripts running and then if you need more you pay or something like that but he says he's he's able to set up all of his rules and scenes and he really likes that so I just wanted to throw that out there too so thank you Chris fun yeah I like this stuff we're you know I feel like we're at a sort of the next plateau now of smart home where there's enough devices out there economically priced such that it makes sense for many of us to have a few of these and if you can find the right thing to tie it together and that's sort of the quest we're on right now home kits one option but you need either home bridge or every device to be home kit compatible so there's some limitations there smart things is another option but you know a lady from and and google assistant are also options here and they can be your you know your automation hub and like I said a lady hub is is pretty good for you know simple to moderate automation which might be all any of us need so we'll continue down this path wow we're any any thoughts on that path before we move on my friend no it's I guess what it is yeah all right Andrew writes while we're still on the smart home thing Andrew says after seeing too many friends and family members have flooding of different degrees in their homes I would like to ask if you have a smart water alarm system that you can recommend it doesn't need to shut off the main water valve but obviously that's a nice thing to have says I don't mind using a hub and he says I would like to be able to place 8 to 10 of these sensors around my home sensors should be able to be powered by you know double a or triple a batteries or something like that have a loud audible alarm and be smart enabled so that they can trigger some sort of alert even if it doesn't have the ability to shut off the water says the best option I've found so far but as of February 19 is something that iPhones could not use them more than three of them and he'll send a link to this I will see if I can go there while we're going through all of this but he says I think it's a serious issue this flooding thing that is not taken seriously by enough people so he found the Gavi Wi-Fi water leak detector but it supports only three of these sensors but it's relatively inexpensive it's 55 bucks and it is it's Wi-Fi so so there you go yeah so and he's right you know I don't have one of these in my house but as I'm reading this like man like when it comes to floods I will tell you it is not an if scenario it is a when scenario and of course you might not put a sensor in the spot where your flood happens so there's also that but there's some places where it's likely to happen and those would be good places to have these sensors so that you're not caught by surprise I I came home from vacation once and we had a flood of sorts our fish tank sprung a leak so even if we had sensors I don't think I would put one you know on the floor in front of the fish tank but so that was a that was sort of a you know an interesting thing thankfully the fish all survived because it only leaked out about half the tank it was at part of the scene but anyway you this will happen John had a flood right when when you had your your pipes burst so like it happens and and it will happen so yeah so this is good I kind of want to throw this out as a geek challenge we've we've run into a couple of these John you ran into one it doesn't have sensors last year at CES but but monitors flow or something is that right they're able to who it's flow flow FLO right yeah I saw them a couple of years ago but um yeah from what I can tell they take a combination of I see that they let's see pressure flow rate and temperature so they read those three values and depending on what they are they can determine if there's a leak or other terrible things happening and this is one that it'll actually turn off the water because a lot of times if you have a leak or something like that you want to make sure it doesn't flood your basement so if this detects something wrong you can have the option to to shut it off interesting yeah yeah this looks like you install it in line so there's some plumbing required it looks like to to set this one up you'd want to get a plumber to do this for you got it yep yep or if you're used to sweating pipe then you probably do it yourself but yeah um I ran into one also last year at CES called Guardian and this one actually it's interesting they do have sensors and the sensors um you know you can put wherever you need to they are battery powered and then it also has a part of the unit that you doesn't require a plumber at least from what I can tell you clamp it onto your pipes and it's got a motor that you put on top of your shut off valve so it grabs your shut off valve for you and opens or closes it depending on whether or not you're having a leak so this I have not tried this but you know now that we're talking about it and Andrews brought this up I feel like if I don't put something like this in place I'm going to have a nice story to tell you about how I regretted not putting something like this in place but but yeah so there's stuff out there I would love to hear you know from everybody if you've if you've got one send it in you know find us somewhere you can find us on twitter too at Mackie Cab so send us a note there if you don't want to use the email that we provided previously good on this one John so far yeah I know that's the problem it's so far yeah I want to take a second and talk about our second sponsor today which is malware bytes for Mack this is an app that I run on all of my max I'm pretty sure John runs it on his max you know for years we Mac users got to be a little bit smug about how our max weren't targeted by people making malware and viruses and all of that and then max got more popular and now we are targets of these things thankfully not quite as widespread as our you know windows using brethren but it's out there and I you know keep my max scanned at least once a week if not all the time because I don't want to get caught right like that's what we talk about here all the time don't get caught well this is one way to not get caught go to malwarebytes.com slash Mack you download malwarebytes for Mack proven technology that crushes these things right it can scan the average Mac in under 30 seconds and this is true it scans mine all of mine and quite less than that and it will detect and also if you like you probably would like remove adware unwanted programs viruses ransomware and of course malware with their anti malware technology and it can do all of this in real time if you like to so that it can catch all these threats automatically so you're protected without even having to think about it and your Mac keeps running silky smooth so it's cyber security that's smart enough for the Mac visit malwarebytes.com slash Mack you can download this for free you can use it for free and also for free you get a 14 day trial of their premium real time offering so you can see how that works to visit malwarebytes.com slash Mack and of course our thanks to malwarebytes for sponsoring this episode alright John let's talk about networks it's fun stuff don't you think? JP has a question for us and JP says I've noticed that Eros speed test app always clocks my ISP bandwidth at super high levels which leads me to believe that I'm getting that speed from my ISP yet when I run speed test on my desktop or using the web version it always shows me way less than advertised so which one do I believe and why do you think this is the case and he asked a question a clarifying question that will open the right doors here he says also when Ero runs a speed test is it defaulting to the gateway that is connected to the modem rather than the closest beacon or gateway to my device so yeah when Ero runs this is a classic example of weakest link in the chain so let's keep that concept in our heads while we sort of march through this when Ero runs a speed test it's running a speed test from the router Ero so the one that is closest to your and plugged into your internet connection either your cable modem or your DSL or whatever it is but it is taking that one the one that's running the show and doing a speed test from that device out to the internet so in theory this is not in theory for certain this is going over a wired connection is not impacted by any of your devices or wireless or anything inside your house it's just going from the Ero to the outside world so it is truly testing your internet speed at its maximum and I put an asterisk on that last little bit at its maximum because it's possible I've seen it where Ero speed tests have not been able to go high enough to say test gigabit connections most of the time they can but not all the time so if you have a gigabit connection and you're only seeing that hit you know five, six, seven hundred megabits per second that might not be an issue with your connection there's you should do further testing before you are certain of that but I have seen it get over nine hundred megabits per second on those so yes that's what Ero is doing now when you run speed test from your Mac or from your iPhone or whatever that is testing so that's testing your max speed out to the internet so when Ero runs a speed test it's testing the speed from the Ero when you run a speed test on your Mac even if you tell or on your iPhone even if you tell Ero to run a speed test inside the Ero app it is doing it from the router Ero out not from your device but when you run the speed test app or as he said you go to speedtest.net or any one of the various like DSL reports, speed test whatever they are they are going from your device and so there might be a weaker link in the chain between you and the outside world we know that in JP's case his Ero is seeing whatever his maximum speed is let's call it gigabit for the sake of this right so he's getting nine hundred fifty megabits per second and when he tests from his Mac he's getting two hundred megabits per second well we know that the Ero can talk nine hundred so there's got to be a weaker link in the chain between the Mac and the Ero most likely that is Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi does not go at gigabit speeds for any of our client devices certainly we can get Wi-Fi to go gigabit speeds maybe but none of our client devices are capable of that so this is where and Eros devices are all two by two radios in them so the maximum speed that you could get on a five gigahertz connection to a two by two radios is eight hundred thirty three megabits per second because 802.11ac is four thirty three per stream times two here we are eight sixty six but you're never going to get that you're more likely going to get about half of that maybe a little more I've seen it hit five hundred but nothing higher than that and that's perfect conditions no interference near the router etc etc so that's what you're getting and that's why you're getting that and it is that just weak link in the chain and it's kind of nice to know that your internet connection is faster than your Wi-Fi can go there may be a question as to why you want internet that can go faster than your Wi-Fi but and if you've got devices plugged in ethernet or you know multiple devices that if depending on how you have your Wi-Fi you might be able to get all of them streaming at the same time like there's there's some benefits there but but it is a question worth asking so alright John thoughts on this now weakest link in the chain yep yep yep I think that's the right way to think about it right like kind of frame this thing I don't know a better way yeah it's just different tubes different size tubes yeah right yeah yeah that's right yeah different size tubes yeah I like that yeah it's not a it's not that it's a weak link it's a it's just a different size tube yeah yeah yeah and hopefully that hopefully that helps but it does lead us to realize that Wi-Fi is great and especially with 802.11ac like Wi-Fi can go fast enough for what we most of us need most of the time if not all of the time but it's not the currently not the fastest thing that we can have with Wi-Fi 6 we might start getting there but like I reserve the right to change my mind on that as we actually get to test it and see what it's like in the real world and all that good stuff but if you can wire your house and you have max that you can plug in or devices that you can plug in and use those wires you get two benefits number one you get the benefits of ethernet speed which either go gigabit speeds or 10 gigabit if you want to go that route it's definitely going to be faster than Wi-Fi what's also going to happen is you are decongesting your Wi-Fi it's like Sudafed for your Wi-Fi right because you're just taking out these extra devices so that the devices that have to use Wi-Fi aren't competing with devices that don't have to use Wi-Fi so Karsten asks I'm building a new house and I want to run cat 6a 10 gigabit speed wiring throughout the house I was wondering if anyone has any cool tips on where to run cables which might come in handy some day as an example I plan on wiring our closets with data and power for printer and network scanner placement power to maybe power a mesh point if I want with ethernet backhaul and he said you know he's going to wire extra places which is totally smart like definitely when the walls are not yet up wiring is super cheap it gets way more expensive and way more troublesome once you have sheetrock screwed into place he says should I wire behind the fridge with data and cable TV I'm thinking a smart fridge or a TV in the fridge he says the wire is not expensive so why not I already plan on wiring for an HD antenna under the roof line connected to a 4 tuner home run recording to a Mac mini and move shows to my Synology says I prefer to wire connect as much as I can so I can free up Wi-Fi just like we were talking about says my Mac mini units and my Synology DS 1819 plus all have 10 gig ethernet ports so we'll have two separate ISP ISP feeds with one gig each that's great that's a little overkill for most of us he says but any advice is welcome just trying to avoid having to crack drywall open later and like that's exactly it my general advice is anywhere you think you might want ethernet put it and at the very very least put it at least one drop in every room and yes you might as well put it in the bathroom too I know it seems like you would say well when am I ever going to put a device in the bathroom I have two immediate examples that come to mind number one you might want to put a Sonos speaker in there and you might want that wired or some other kind of smart speaker although HomePod doesn't have an ethernet port that's fine you also might want to use your bathroom as the place where you put a mesh point for your wireless network and mesh points are always better if you can plug them in ethernet there boom you're good to go so I would put at least one in every room and maybe more and if you've got like a walk-in closet why not and that's really the question to look at is why not make sure that you've got leave yourself the next homeowner room for creative expansion what do you think about this John I think that my house has RJ 11 and cable connectors in every room well right but what do you think about Karsten oh no absolutely I always um wired I think will always be faster so as much wired stuff as you can place in as many places as you can put it yeah I'm with you yeah to your point though you know like at your house and my house and and any of us that already have the drywall up without ethernet behind it mocha the technology that sends effectively ethernet signals over your existing coax wires in your walls can be the saving grace for you especially the bonded mocha to adapters I've pushed almost 900 megabits per second over a crummy run of coax with with those and I and it is it is the reason that I have not had to crack open my walls or you know hire an electrician to figure out how to get an ethernet drop near my TV it's it makes a big difference so it is a stopgap measure and we'll put a link to the to the action tech bonded mocha to adapters in the show notes those are basically the only ones to use these days I think there might be some others but I haven't found any that are super reliable yet but we'll get there we'll get there so alright let's see where are we on time here we had some comments from last week's show specifically about well we'll start with the private cloud stuff because you know dropbox is changing that's important right John good the first one it comes from Matt so I was listening to your latest episode about dropbox limiting the number of devices on free accounts while this would not be a solution for everyone I think a large number of your listeners like me have a Synology NAS okay fair he says and I use cloud sync or cloud station on my NAS oh cloud sync on my NAS to sync a couple of different google drives and a couple of different dropbox accounts to folders on the NAS so it's true you can it's essentially running like the dropbox client or the google drive client on your NAS so it can sync down all of this stuff it's now got a copy of all the things that are on your dropbox he says I sync these to folders that I then sync to all my max and iOS devices with Synology Drive so the only thing that's working to dropbox is his Synology Unit that's one okay great I think that takes up one slot on your you know on your dropbox thing when you have three if your account is free and then immediately all of those things are then synced using Synology Drive from his Synology to any number of his devices because that's his so it's a great little work around he says it has several advantages it works in both directions so files shared with me from clients show up on my Mac and if I delete a file from the folder inside Synology Drive it disappears from dropbox as well he said this method also lets me sync multiple dropboxes and multiple google drives or multiple whatever else I want without having to install more memory stealing applications or you know jury rig things together he says if I need to share something directly from dropbox or google drive I just log into my account in my web browser share the file and move on with life this is brilliant and really is a solution for anybody that's got a Synology any any flavor of Synology can do this and it really could save you here and also even like without the the dropbox limitation like being able to not run the Google Drive app and the Dropbox app and the Box app and all of that crap on your Mac that like that there's a benefit there too I kind of like this that's not a bad solution that's good thinking Matt I like this what do you think about this John yeah I like recently upgraded to Drive sure and yeah you and I talked out a little bit and actually I read I don't know why I didn't map the things probably the first time around but now I'm expecting up all the folders and great I do something similar I I'll back up my Google Drive and Dropbox to the Synology so are you doing that on the Synology are you running cloud sync on your Synology so that it does it natively are you doing it like backwards from what Matt well running the Drive app okay so right so you are this is actually great because some other people think and I'm in one way sync mode okay so here's the interesting thing you are syncing you so you're running the Dropbox app on your Mac right and then you're running the Synology Drive app on your Mac and you are having the Synology Drive app sync the contents of your Dropbox from your Mac to your Synology is that right correct so here's a thing and also my G and your Google Drive so you can stop that because there's an app called cloud sync on Synology that will connect your Synology directly to your Google Drive and your Dropbox and let them sync directly with your Synology and then you can do what Matt is turn off your Dropbox and Google Drive on your Mac and sync only with Drive right so the same exact thing just ah yeah I know like but I read Matt's thing it was like dude I like that because actually yeah well yeah the less pieces of software you're running the less of a chance that something terrible is going to happen right or just consuming just consuming system resource yeah yeah I'll put a link to cloud sync but it's just a normal Synology app yeah and and it'll sync Dropbox Google Drive um it does several others to um one drive like yeah it's this is great I think it's good stuff I yeah I'm going to I'm going to definitely change my life around with this um listener Dan suggested doing something similar without a Synology so this is for those of you that don't have a Synology but want to like liked the discussion we just had and want to take advantage of it Dan suggests using Resilio sync so Resilio sync used to be BitTorrentSync it is a peer to peer uh syncing technology does not require a server so you don't need that Synology though there's there's a client for Synology for Resilio sync as well so you could do the same thing uh have your Dropbox and Google Drive sync to one Mac that hopefully is on all the time and then sync that folder using Resilio sync to all of your other devices so same exact concept just using Resilio sync uh instead of of you know Synology's cloud sync and all that stuff so yeah it's a good tip I like it and the other thing that really excites me about all of this John is that up until a couple of days ago Synology Drive was not native for the iOS files app you could it would you could make the files app see it but when you did it would jump to like a different interface and it was clergy and not like not what you would want uh it didn't feel native because it wasn't native and therefore you couldn't have like folders from within your drive as favorites in your iOS files app well Synology Drive 2.0 for iOS now native files support and it's truly awesome so you can take those folders and make them favorites you can jump right to them it is just like having iCloud Drive you know it's it it it lives at the same level as iCloud Drive Dropbox is also native on iOS inside files so now you really can just do this Synology syncing totally smoothly and it's great like makes a huge difference especially timing you know where we are here with with what Dropbox is changing so I'm really stoked this is one of the things we love about Synology is is yeah they make these geeky sort of you know platform ubiquitous tools but they're really focused on iOS and Mac apps and making them work well and expanding our functionality and sort of picking up where Apple leaves off so this is it's good stuff that's really good stuff have you tried the new Synology Drive app yet John no I know I just happened to see it last night that it was like 10 minutes this is what's this native file support I've wanted this for years you know I was like oh yay finally so it's good you know what else is good John is all of our Mac premium supporters I want to take a minute as we do and thank everybody whose contributions came in in the last I think week in a half or two weeks actually Wayne from Sacramento had a $100 contribution so thank you very much Wayne you rock on the monthly $10 plan we had contributions come in from Jeff from Connecticut Barry from Flying Overhead Bob from Working Smarter for Mac users Ryan from Plano Neil from Connecticut Scott from Portland Chris from Hartfordshire or Hartfordshire I don't know how if I'm saying that right James from San Antonio Joe from Kansas Abdullah from Maryland Ari from Oakland Dave from Socrates Michael from Kansas Bob from Quebec Frank from Tunbridge Tim from Tennessee John from Pennsylvania Santiago from Florida John from North Carolina Clyde from Virginia Tony from Massachusetts and Ken from Honolulu so thanks to all of you and then on the biannual $25 every six month plan thanks to Kurt from Illinois Louis from California Bob from Massachusetts James from California Robin from Hampshire Rob from New South Wales Colby from Colorado Barb from South Carolina at $30 every six months Mark from California Donald from Massachusetts George from Massachusetts Andy from New Hampshire Ed from California at $50 every six months Willie from Mississippi Jed from New Jersey Scott from Georgia Steve from New Mexico Laura from Washington Scott from Arkansas and Andrew from California our sincere thanks as always to all of you that can and do contribute it is not mandatory as you know we still take questions from everybody but you know those of you that are premium members you send a premium at macgeekab.com not only do you get that warm fuzzy feeling of supporting your two favorite geeks but you also get your questions answered first because that's you know it's just it's what we can do all right John let's should we jump to this time machine things we seem to be having some time machine issues again lately shall we yes let's see so Mark Mark says I have a 2009 MacBook Pro and a 2015 MacBook Air both backing up wirelessly to a USB hard drive that is plugged into my Apple time capsule router other family members are backing up to the internal drive on the time capsule with no problems and my MacBook Pro is backing up to the external drive with no problems as well the problem this morning is coming from the air about once a week or so for the past month I get the message that time machine completed a verification of your backups and to improve reliability time machine must create a new backup for you the first two times I let it start one and it worked properly for a few days before the error came back and the most recent time I disabled time machine deleted the sparse bundle and started completely from scratch and this seemed to do the trick for 10 days before giving me the dreaded error it's frustrating why is this happening so yeah this is a common issue with time machine and in fact I was just talking about it recently at the PMUG meeting down that I did in Princeton, New Jersey in general time machine is built for direct attached disks like some disk that you are plugging directly into and has proven over the years to be wholly unreliable for many scenarios of network backups yes I know Apple made the time capsule for exactly this but they didn't really make it for exactly this they just created it and sort of you know shove this functionality into time capsule or time machine to allow it to back up over the network but it's it's flaky and I use it that way like I think John you do too but time machine is a client only protocol and what that means is it is 100% up to your Mac to manage the state of the backup the server in this case the time capsule but you could back up to a Synology and Western Digital has some cloud devices that will you know let you back up time machine etc etc the server is dumb in these scenarios there's nothing it can do to facilitate the backup other than just sharing the folder and letting your Mac put whatever it wants into this folder and so what it's going to put in there is a sparse bundle and your Mac has to keep that sparse bundle in shape it would be much better if your Mac was handing files to some server app on your time capsule and that was then writing those files down so that it could manage that sparse bundle and keep it from getting corrupted by say network interruptions because when you're writing to a sparse bundle and you lose access to it because the network dropped sometimes perhaps too often it gets corrupted and that's what you're seeing here it's likely that the way you're using your air it is maybe it's got weaker wifi signal or something or somebody shutting it off in the middle of backups or whatever it is it's just not built for this so you can manually you can turn time machine off which really just turns the scheduler off and only back up manually when you know that you are in a scenario where that is going to be most reliable but otherwise there's no magic answer here is unfortunately what I got John what do you got I got a magic answer yeah man so I remember when I first off I'm with you in the analysis of this is that there was something weird happening over the network now I don't know if it was a bug in time machines implementation or what I just think I mean if you if you write to a network drive and then you know yank your connection like it's going to get corrupted especially when you're creating a disk image inside like a convoluted disk image inside of a net like it's just it's bad I think that's all it is the thing is I had the problem much less often once I moved to the Euro so I think it was the quality of the time machine Wi-Fi that makes sense a reliable wireless network things got better which makes which fits yeah I'll buy that yeah the the thing the disconnection thing I do that regularly and that if I'm running a time machine backup from my MacBook Pro sometimes I'll put it to sleep and when I wake it up again it you know resumes it knows that it's supposed to continue backing up sure I have not experienced any corruption in ages but when I did here's a suggestion make a backup backup like that's crazy talk why would you do that well I had situations where I would do a backup from I would back up my time machine back up from one Synology to another one and when I did have a corruption issue what would sometimes fix it is why don't you go to back to the good one that you had yesterday and that would fix the problem and it would catch up so I like that your back back up your backup so maybe you want to take your your time machine back up and maybe a carbon copy cloner it yeah or well yeah that's right I mean if it's on your Synology or something like you can have it do the backup of the backup and that's way that's way more efficient because then you're not like doing it across the network again but if yeah I hyper yeah I hyper back up yeah everything from one to the other yeah interesting interesting interesting Phil has a related time machine question so I came across something I've never seen before in each case I was starting a backup after there had been a substantial gap in time since the last one says I was surprised to see that the amount time machine wanted to back up was actually larger or almost as large as the source hard drive but definitely more than the data on the drive how can that be perhaps there were local snapshots that needed to be transferred from the local drive to the attached hard drive yeah I think that's probably part of it it's also possible you know I mentioned in the last show that I was having a problem where time machine was telling me it needed to back up more than the space I had given it which also interestingly enough was more than the space that it was coming from and I dug around and found that that acronis true image had set up a cache file that was essentially a sparse bundle that could grow to be 500 gigs but was not 500 gigs but for whatever reason time machine saw it as a 500 gig thing or 132 gig thing or whatever it was and was like I got to make room for this 432 over here I can't do it I wasn't currently using true image on that machine so I removed it but if I were using true image then I would have just excluded that folder from time machine I used clean my max space lens to find that file it was the only one that found it daisy disk didn't even see it so that's what I would do is actually run something like clean my max space lens and and see if if you've got some file that's just massive and huge that might do it thoughts on that John before we leave time machine behind for the day yeah I had I don't know what caused it but I had a weird thing the other day where you know it's starting to do the time machine backup then it's like yeah I'm going to back up this much data that has less than this amount of space and I'm like aren't you supposed to like check that before you start to back up that there's enough space and I let it run and also it was huge I think it was after an OS update but that could do it too because a lot of files get touched in that scenario and what happened is it it ran until it ran out of space and it said hey I ran out of space I'll try to free some up the next time around and it did oh that's good yeah sometimes I've seen that where it takes like it'll say I ran out of space but I'll try next time and it takes a couple of times and then sort of sorts itself out yeah yeah that's good one question that seems to come up a lot unrelated to time machine we'll leave that behind for now Aaron asks why is there no T2 chip in the 2019 iMacs he says at this point the T2 chip should not be too expensive I'm wondering if the redesigned iMac body was not ready so Apple just slapped an i9 in the current slash classic body thoughts I think the reason because the same could be said for the Mac mini right the Mac mini was essentially shoved into the same body give or take right and it has a T2 chip but there's one difference between the two and that is the Mac mini is not sold with any sort of rotating hard drive and the iMac is you can still get a fusion drive on the low end one and for a lot of people that's in terms of balancing cost for features that's probably not a bad way to go and I really think that the T2 requires the SSD to be effective with the way that file vault and all that works on it I think that's the reason for it and I'm actually really stoked about the new iMac refresh because no longer is there too much overlap between what the Mac mini can do and what the iMac can do like all the new iMac machines are essentially pro machines you can still get that sort of low end older non refreshed in 2019 iMac right but the ones that were refreshed those are all like those are pro machines and you know the top end Mac mini is arguably a pro machine as well but to me that's really the only overlap that exists and and that's a good thing it's nice to kind of have a clear line clearish line much clearer than before line so yeah what do you think man I don't have a T2 chip right right it's a good movie though right maybe the effects were awesome sure for their time yeah all right I'll give you that liquid metal that was liquid metal was cool yeah I'll give you that I'll give you that you know what while we're on this T2 thing and File Vault and all that we'll head down this path with Karsten this might cause us to run a little long but it does answer this he says a friend of mine called and said his older MacBook Pro that his 5 years old died with to power indications he says oh I tried a different power supply and no joy in the good old days we simply ejected the hard drive and placed it in an external enclosure and extracted the data in this case File Vault is enabled so what does one do to extract the data says I believe my assistance is at his end due to File Vault and told my friend to get an Apple appointment to ask for their flat rate repair he says with any luck it is a bad power supply and all his data is safe says the reason for emailing is to see what options we have to recover the data off a dead laptop today with File Vault I believe you are just out of luck and only Apple can assist what if a laptop powers on and has File Vault enabled can we power the laptop in target disk mode to get the data off and how do we battle the T2 chip for OS issues we hope we can reinstall via recovery and that will do the trick he says I suppose that one could eject the drive and create a second user account on an existing Mac and log in with that and hope the File Vault key is stored there but what if the SSD is built right into the motherboard it goes without saying that backups are now more important than ever especially when encryption is in play says I just I hope the geek community not sure what he's saying here but anyway he's right that backups when you encrypt your data you know that one more vector for you to lose access to your data it doesn't require a failed drive necessarily if the computer around the drive fails that also can be an issue especially with a T2 equipped Mac so he's right that with File Vault and now we're not talking T2 specifically yet but we'll get there with File Vault a recovery key is set when you enable it and it's a really good idea to securely store that key somewhere if you need it if you haven't iCloud might be able to help and we'll put a link to an article about how your key might be stored in iCloud if you answered that question when you were going through it's an interesting scenario now with T2 and just to be fair if you don't store your key somewhere and iCloud could be one somewhere if it's not stored somewhere else you may not be able to access that drive like that data is there's no like Apple doesn't have a master key for you so iCloud is your hope and most of the time it is stored there so it can be in okay shape it gets more interesting with T2 now the T2 chip is the security chip that's in the new Apple laptops and as we mentioned the new Mac mini but not the new iMacs and it takes care of a lot of this security stuff for target disk mode it does not get in the way you can still use target disk mode with the T2 chip in its default mode but you can't boot from an external drive with the T2 chip in its default mode you need to go in to the system we talked about in the last episode and I forget the name of it but maybe somebody in the chat room will help me but you go into recovery mode on the Mac before you have a problem and you can turn off some of these features with the system recovery agent or something where you're essentially the system security agent where you are managing what the T2 chip limits and one of those things is whether or not you want to be able to boot from an external but you can boot target disk mode the problem is though if you extract the drive from that Mac you're in this scenario and the Mac's power supply dries and you extract the drive the key is not on the drive the key is on that T2 chip so if the Mac that it came from cannot be powered with the drive in it you might not be able to get at that data at all so yeah that's where things get interesting and it is the start up security utility thanks to Brian Monroe in the chat room and I'll put a link to that in there but that's where you can set what you want the T2 chip to do at some level there's two things secure boot and external boot that's it but yeah there you go what do you think John is a bit too secure for Mac taste um yeah you know what that's yeah I mean I've turned all this stuff off on mine I want to be able to boot any OS and I want to be able to boot it from an external drive and I realized this you know I was wide open I know that security wise that's less but hey there you go and as Alan 567 in the chat room says always run a backup don't get caught he's not wrong he's not wrong folks backups are just one way that we can you know get ourselves to the not getting caught realm right John indeed listening to Mac eCabs another way tell your friends to listen seriously like that really that helps us you know those iTunes reviews help us but telling your friends helps us too it's makes a big difference we appreciate it we appreciate you listening we appreciate questions we appreciate cash fly at cash fly dot com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you we appreciate our sponsors as we mentioned in the show other world computing at Mac sales dot com and malware bites dot com slash Mac but also we appreciate all the other sponsors that we have smile at smile software dot com slash podcast bare bone software at bare bones dot com ops genie at ops genie dot com Eero dot com slash M G G there's some more coming too it's good what do you think John what are you what are you thankful for on this wonderful Sunday before the Monday that the show's released any any three things maybe that you're thankful for or or more I don't know three things yes and they are don't get caught