 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 726 from Monday, September 10th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We mix them all together. The goal is that we have fun. The goal is that we, I was going to say mostly stick to our agenda, but we don't really care about that. Although we do have a good agenda. Most weeks. So we try to. But really the goal is that we each, you, me, that person over there, all of us, each learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include IMAZING. We're at IMAZING.com slash MGG. You can save 30% on all licenses to this stellar iPhone management utility that picks up where iTunes leaves you hanging. Ring at ring.com slash MGG where you can learn all about how you can get whole home security for just 10 bucks a month and Jamf Now. We're at Jamf.com slash MGG. You get your first three devices free for life of this great management utility package service here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. Yes, it is. How are you today, Mr. John F. Braun? Good. Though it's a I don't know what happened, man. It turned from summer to fall like overnight. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And for our friends down south, Florence is coming. And I've already heard there's some evacuation orders in the Carolinas. So if you're down there, watch it. And they may come visit may visit us. I don't know. They're still uncertain, but it looks looks pretty nasty. So if you're down south, listen to the authorities and get out of there. There you go. Yeah. I was down not past you, but south of you this weekend. We we were I had to be in the very tip of Long Island in a town called Montauk. Yeah, you were. Were you performing? I thought you were performing. No, no. Tending. I was attending. I did not perform. No, no. I was just my my sisters. Well, my brother-in-law got married. So so we were we were guests at the wedding, as you would imagine. And no, I but I was very interested in what the band had had to do. In fact, any this band was and the flow of this wedding was was quite unique, at least in my experience. And I play a lot of weddings. So if you want to learn all about that, I will pimp my own giggab podcast at giggabpodcast.com, the one we did today, episode 181. Oh, no, I hit that backwards. That's 181. Talked all about that. So yeah, there you go. So I will put a link to that in the show notes. And and then we will get to Douglas here. Douglas has a great quick tip. He says, dude, based on your advice, I purchased Pedia. I have a feeling this nickname is going to spread wide now that I've now that I've explained why my kid. You're not the dude. No, no, no, no, no, by by no by no stretch of the imagination. Am I the dude? But but dude, he says, based on your advice, I purchased PDF Pen scan plus for my iPhone, I already had PDF Pen Pro on my Mac. So I thought it would be a good fit after purchasing and downloading the app on my iPhone. I thought that for convenience, I would download it on my iPad as well. However, when bringing up the app in the iPad's app store, the price was still indicated rather than the download icon, which normally appears when you have already purchased the app. I know that some apps are a separate purchase for the iPhone and iPad, but when reading the description of PDF Pen scan plus, this did not seem to be the case. Even after a couple of days, the price still appeared. So the quick tip is on my iPad, I went into App Store and then tapped on my account, which usually I think you're going to tap on your picture, and then click on Purchased or tap on Purchased, he says. And sure enough, PDF Pen scan plus was listed there with the download icon. I tapped the download icon and was good to go. So this is a good reminder that you can do this and download apps that if for whatever reason, they're showing up in the store. One reason they might show up in the store with the price on them still is if you have not signed in recently to the app store on that device. So it's possible that when Douglas went to App Store account purchased somewhere in the middle there, it said, hey, we need your password again. And he logged in and then it showed him his purchases because it should have showed him that on the other side or maybe it was just a mistake. Now, if you have a family account and there are other people on this family account, when you tap on your account and go to Purchased, you get to pick which users purchases you are going to see. And this is a handy way to go in because you don't know. If you purchase, like if my wife purchases something, I will not see it with the download icon if I am browsing the app store. Even though if I were to click on it, it would say, hey, somebody in your family who has bought this, you can download it for free. You have no way of knowing, but if you go and navigate that way to the purchases and if I, in this example, choose my wife, boom, now I'll be able to see it all and I can just tap the download icons. So there you go. A double tip for you there. Good. Is it still the case that if you purchased an app in either of the app stores that you're allowed to put it on up to five devices or is that that old? It's more than five, but that is true. Yeah, I think for iOS it's 10 now and I think on the Mac it's five. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, no problem. Okay, but a good tip because I'm sure if he tried to purchase it again, they'd gladly allow him to do that again. Well, no, if he tried to purchase it again, it would, as long as he was logged in with an account that owned it or as I just said, an account that's related to a family account that owns it, when you tap to purchase it, it'll probably ask you to sign in and then it will say, oh, you don't need to buy this, you get it for free. But you have already committed to buying it before it tells you it's not gonna charge you. So it's not the best user experience because you have no idea, unless you just know in your heart of hearts that it's definitely not gonna charge me, I'm trusting the system. The system always works, but at least in my experience, but it's not, you have no way of knowing, which is frustrating. So this way you know, which is handy. You know, we talk a lot about cruft on this show, John. And listener Todd linked us to a Seth Godin podcast. And it was all about sunk costs. I know that seems weird. It's a great concept. I was gonna say it's a great business concept to understand and it is, but it doesn't just apply to business and anything in life. It really is good to accept the concept of sunk costs. But in this episode, they talked about the origin of the word cruft. And it's very, and John, I'm getting an echo from you. So I gotta ask you to turn down your headphones maybe or I don't know, it's something. It's interesting though. I don't usually get an echo from you. I turned down my headphones a bit. Thank you, sir. And I can already tell it's fixed. There was, at Harvard University, there was a laboratory built in 1915 as a gift from a donor named Harriet Otis Cruft, which they called the Cruft Laboratory. And it was the Harvard Physics Department's radar lab during World War II. And then they said as late as the early 1990s, unused technical equipment could be seen stacked in front of the Cruft Hall's windows. And according to students, if a place is filled with useless machinery and that place is called Cruft Hall, then therefore the machinery itself must be cruft. And so the word cruft became associated with discarded technical clutter. And that is where we have cruft as of today. So I will link to both this Wikipedia article as well as the episode of the Seth Godin podcast. But yeah, pretty good, huh? We'll still use- I fondly remember when I started my undergraduate work, Dave, they were hauling the punch card reader-writer machines out of Norwalk State Technical College. Wow. Definitely cruft. That, I would say that despite not being removed from Cruft Hall, that's still, I would call that cruft, yeah, man. Yeah. That's great. Wow. Pretty good. Then we use the mainframe. I think it was a Honeywell CP6 or something. Wow. It's like, oh, Honeywell? Yeah, they made computers at one point. Wow. All right. I'll put a link to that in the show notes too. There you go. John might be older than he looks. It's possible, John F. Brunn is an alien. It's possible. I'm just saying. Anything is possible until proven false. Zach writes, he said, you know, there is so much complaining about USBC dongles, it makes no sense to me. My philosophy is to just buy new proper cables and don't look back. He says it's so much more pleasant than dongles. Anchor, he says, for example, makes great cables. And if you shop around there mostly under 15 bucks for a lightning to USBC, and all the other types are way cheaper, being that USBC is an open standard. Cables for peripherals are cheap and plentiful. He said he found a printer cable that goes from USBB, which is the square kind of house looking USB to USBC. And he says, you know, he bought it for $7. He says, instead of plugging my printer using its old cable into a $20 dongle, he just got a USBC to USBB cable, and he's good to go. There is merit in Zach's thought process here. I think there's a worthy distinction between a dongle, AKA an adapter, that just gets, for example, you know, a USBA to USBC so that you can use all these old cables and a USBC hub, right, which can be really handy because you can have multiple USBA ports on it. And like we talked about recently, you know, there's that one that has ethernet at the end and HDMI and things like that. But yeah, yeah, there's nothing wrong with shopping around on Amazon for some inexpensive cables to skip needing the dongle. So I'm with you on that, Zach, good call. You ready to go USBC yet, John? I don't yet have a device with USBC, but as we discussed in a prior show, the day will probably the next MacBook Pro that I get will probably have USBC and I'm gonna have to deal with it. Yeah, yeah, I don't, I think the, I think a better way to look at it is you will not have to deal with it. You will be able to embrace it because there is some elegance to USBC, right? I mean, it, it's, you know, I like that they're standardizing on a connector. It's just the fact that you have to buy new stuff. Correct. Either dongles or cables, but that's the progress, man. It's just how it goes, exactly. Yep. All right, on the subject of USBC and dongles, Dusty writes, he said, we talked about Dusty in the, I think it was just in the last episode, John, using the virtual box or some virtualization software and his old USB radio. And he said, I had a few minutes this morning. He made a breakthrough, man, it was awesome. Yeah, he says. Thank you so much for getting back to us on that because we led him in the right direction, but continue. Yeah, no, you're right. We'd led him in the right and then he found the answer. He says, I had a few minutes and tried something that I heard on the show. He says, I installed a hardware griller to see what happens when I plug the radio into my desktop. My desktop would see the radio so I knew the radio can connect with a Mac and show up as hardware. After I installed the hardware griller, it showed up as the radio Kenwood THD's 74 like it's supposed to. So I then proceeded to install hardware griller on my laptop. The laptop is a USB C only MacBook Pro. So requires an adapter to get a USB device to connect. I was using the same cable as on the desktop and the desktop was going through a hub. So I didn't think that would cause a problem. I have three adapters that do different things but all happened to have USB three ports on them or really USB A ports capable of USB three on them. He says, I tried a different adapter and bingo. Hardware griller chimed in with the radio being connected. I opened virtual box and added the device and boom. Now Windows 7 sees the device like it's supposed to. So the lesson here is that not all dongles act the same. I'm guessing that he's got three dongles. He says that have as he calls them USB three ports but as I sort of added for clarity they are USB A ports capable of USB three speeds. Perhaps his Kenwood THD 74 radio is a USB one device and it's possible that one of these dongles maybe only supports USB two and USB three but isn't properly backwards compatible all the way back to whatever flavor of USB one this device uses. So not all dongles are created equal. And that's, he didn't share any details about which dongle did not function and which one did. It's possible they don't even have brand names on them. You've seen some of these things that are just sort of dime a dozen. And so it's good to be aware that just because a dongle works especially a USB pass through dongle as it were just because it works for one device doesn't necessarily mean that it will work for all especially older slower devices I think is the lesson here. I wouldn't so much worry about like devices where you've got two different USB three hard drives but it is worth bearing in mind and kind of lodging in the backs of our heads for when we're in a scenario troubleshooting this. So thank you Dusty for following up. It's awesome. I echo your sentiments. So did the hub have anything to... No. Do you think that complicated things? Okay, so it was just this. Yeah, he wasn't using a hub with the laptop. He was using a hub with the desktop and that worked just fine. So he assumed that it should also, that some sort of device in the middle. I think that was his point about the hub on the desktop. There was a hub in between the computer and the device on the laptop. It was a dongle and it turns out one of the dongles, no go. Crazy, crazy. Yeah, they don't seem to have much detail. They just say, yeah. So it's a tri-band of amateur radio which actually it looks pretty cool, but they don't think they don't, they just say it has USB. They don't, at least the info I found here, they don't specify, but. Yeah, right, right. It's pretty crazy. It's crazy. We've got a couple of cool stuff found to talk about, John, but the first cool stuff found that I wanna talk about is our first sponsor which is iMazing. iMazing.com slash MGG is what you wanna remember because that's where you're gonna save 30% on all licenses to this awesome. I call it my iPhone management utility that picks up where iTunes leaves me hanging, right? Because there's all kinds of things I wanna do with my iPhone, including just simply backing it up, but I like to have incremental backups and iTunes doesn't really do that. iCloud doesn't do that. iMazing does that. There you go. That's why I like iMazing. One reason I like iMazing. That, you know, iOS 12 is probably out next week, I would think, if all goes according to normal plan. And you can back it up, back up your phone before you do it. Of course, iMazing fully supports iOS 12 and it's already compatible with macOS Mojave, including full support for dark mode, dynamically built in, reactive to the OS, right? And you can use iMazing to transfer data over to your new iPhone, like, because iPhones, you know, presumably you're gonna go on sale the end of this week. You connect both phones, follow the step-by-step wizard, boom, it's great. If you don't have an iCloud backup or if your connection speed is slow and you wanna get the data from your old phone to your new phone, they've got a little wizard there and boom, it transfers it all over. This is just a scratch of the surface of the feature list that iMazing offers. So you gotta go check it out. Go to iMazing.com slash MGG. You're gonna love it. And then you get to save 30% when you buy. So go check it out. iMazing.com slash MGG are thanks to iMazing for doing what they do, creating what they create, and for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Now, cool stuff found from listener Kurt. And if I can find where I'm going here, I will tell you about it. Kurt says, I just finished listening to episode 723 and 724 with the question in chapter 17 of MackieGibb 723 by Andrew about sorting photos by exit date. He says, although in 724 you had the solution with a third-party finder replacement, I don't think I ever heard you mention what I thought was the obvious solution. A better finder, not a better finder rename, but a better finder attributes. He says, Andrew's workaround in 723 was to rename the files according to exit date using a better finder renamer, but a better finder attributes would let him batch set the file creation date from the exit data and he could simply sort in regular finder by creation date. That's a pretty cool thing. He says, I use a better finder attributes all the time to restore creation date on photo files that I've edited. So we will put this in the show notes for sure. You know, this is, it's good stuff. I like this. Good, good, good. What do you think, John? Anything to add here? I think they make good stuff. So yeah, so they have that and I think they have another one called a better finder rename, which- Which is what we mentioned in 724 as the solution because we could have it rename the files, but this actually gets to set the attributes, which is one step deeper, right? Which is cool. Yeah. Pretty good. Anything else on this before we move on? Nope. All right. Gary reminds us that CleanMyMac 10 or CleanMyMac X, but I think it's supposed to be CleanMyMac 10. I never know anymore. He says, has been released and they are offering two choices for upgrades that you can do the usual buy the software once and buy new versions at cost or now they're doing a yearly subscription. He says, if you're a previous customer, you should have gotten an email offering you a 50% price reduction to upgrade. The subscription is $19.95 with the price reduction. He says, the interface is totally different from CleanMyMac 3. Yeah, I'm a set app user as I think many of you folks are where for $9.99 a month you get access to, I don't even know how many apps it is, but it is set app is offered by MacPaw, the people that create CleanMyMac and so boom, CleanMyMac is part of that. And so I immediately picked up the new version and it's, you know, I was able to delete a bunch of cruft from my Mac without any issues. In fact, I need to do that on this one because I'm starting to run out of space. And it also has a malware scanner in there, which is handy. It's got a, I need to work with it a little bit. And I saw a sneak peek of this folks at WWDC. So I'm a little bit ahead of the curve, but not really. And I really liked the way they were doing things with their large file detection thing. So I need to do that on my Macs now, but I'm excited about the way they're kind of putting it all together. They've done some really good user interface and user experience things with it. So thank you very much, Gary, for sending that in and reminding us all that it's there. Pretty good. You have it, right, John? Oh yeah, no, because yeah, both of us have set up. Yeah. Yeah, I think I got an email. They were like, hey, we got something new. You want to check it out? And if you're a setup user, you're cool. Last I checked, I believe IMAZING is also a part of set up, right? You know what I think it could be? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. If you're not hostile to subscription models, then set up is a great way to learn. And they've really improved it. I like it. Every now and then I'll get a notification saying, hey, we added a new app. Click on this and we'll tell you more about what it does. And it's like, wow, that's really nice. Yeah, it's really nice. I agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I like how clean my Mac segments, it breaks down the cruft categories, if you will, in a nice way that I think makes sense to most people and they keep improving it. So it's great. Like you said, old files or large files, it's really good at identifying those. And it's like, dude, you've had this file for the years and it's like, you're not doing anything with it. You want to get rid of it? It's like, yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, you're right about it. The way it segments all the cruft, because there were some things, I was like, I don't know that I want to delete that stuff, but everything else, yeah, that's fine. And I still, I freed up like 30 gigs on my drive, which was great. Like some of it, they're like, you want me to get rid of international languages and stuff, and I'm like, yeah, maybe not. I don't know if it's worth tampering with an app because it may, that may be going too far. But things that are old or large, I would say that's a no-brainer. Yeah, rid of it if you're not. Yeah, it's cool stuff. Cool. Thanks, Kerry. And, you know, I was, and I, oh, it was in the, maybe it was in the chat room here. I forget where it was. Koder Kev, I think it was in the chat room. It was somewhere. Alluded to something called, oh, silly me. It was in our forums. I just should have looked at the link. Our forums, of course, at mackeykev.com slash forums, but specifically I'll put in the link to this. Koder Kev says he has an old 14-inch iBook G4 and was looking for the system disks for it. And we, he found some on eBay that allowed us to kind of look at a couple of things and narrow it down and you can see the thread. And then he said, oh, now that I know what I need, I was able to find that set on Mac Repository or macintoshrepository.org where you can go and download images of these things, old toast images. So you can burn them to a CD or mount them, however you like. So I had no idea about Mac Repository. And so I put a link in the show notes to the forum posts and then, you know, you can find Mac Repository and stuff from there. So pretty cool, Koder Kev. Thanks for telling us about this without even telling us about it. Is that entirely legal? You know, it's not up to me to, I'm not a lawyer. Yeah, I do play a lawyer on TV sometimes. But no, I would guess that there's probably some questionable legality there. But since this is stuff that is really only valuable to somebody that has the hardware that came with it, I think it's probably one of those things where Apple can't officially put all this stuff out. Like remember when they were charging for system software, there was a whole thing where they couldn't upgrade you for free. And I think it was because of Sarbanes-Oxley or something, like the whole, maybe it wasn't Sarbanes-Oxley, but it was something with the SEC where... There was some, yeah, there was some law or regulation saying that you had to charge for an upgrade or something. Well, if you charged for the original one or you were charging for it some other way, then yes, you had to charge for the upgrade. Yeah, right. And so Apple was, their hands were sort of tied by this and they didn't want to go back and rewrite all these user licenses and retroactively. So my guess is that Apple probably is well aware of the Macintosh repository and doesn't care to waste their time. You know, I'm sure the cease and desist letter is just bogged down in paperwork somewhere. And they probably are happy with it that way. So there you go. That's my theory, but I have no idea. The thing is, if you need old system software, what's the harm in making it available? You know, it's kind of like the ROMs for a lot of these old games. Exactly. Where the companies were like, who cares if somebody wants to play, you know, Tempest with the ROM from like 30 years ago. It's like, yeah, we could sue them, but is it really worth it? Just make people happy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. All right, I want to... Actually, you know what I want to do is I want to talk about our second sponsor, if that works for you, Mr. Braun. Absolutely. Sweep. Our second sponsor for this episode is Ring, where at ring.com slash mggu you can learn about how you can get a whole home security system for just $10 a month. The Ring Alarm Security Kit is available at ring.com and retail stores throughout the U.S. You've heard us talk about Ring here, right? They're the ones who totally disrupted the whole industry when they reinvented the doorbell to let you answer the door with your phone from anywhere. And I've done this. It's awesome. In fact, you know, we were talking at the beginning of the episode, how we were away for the weekend. And we had somebody coming by the house to check on our various and sundry pets, including of course Hector, who is at HectorDBird, BYRD on Twitter. And I got a notification that somebody was at my front door and I was able to look at the camera and see, oh yeah, look, it's Ian. He was coming in to check on Hector. And it's like super easy, super simple, and the whole setup of their stuff. I've got their doorbell. I've got a couple of their floodlights and stuff. The setup, the out-of-box experience, basically the open the box up through when you are finished installing the thing. The whole experience is very Apple-like in that they've covered every base. They make it really easy for you to do this. These were literally the easiest, by far, the easiest home improvement things. They gave me all the tools. 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All right, John, let's go to Phil here, shall we, my friend? Phil's got a good one. Yeah, Phil's doing some traveling here and he asks us very importantly. He says, I'm leaving in two weeks and I'm very excited about going to France for a backup of my passport and IDs. Would you suggest creating a note with photos of them and put a password lock on it or encrypt the note? And that's a great idea. Like, there's several ways to skin this particular cat, right? You know, you can do a secure note in Apple's Notes, which is great because that will sync across iCloud and then you'll have it on your devices. I've been doing this for years in the pre-notes world I started. So I've got them all in one password but essentially doing the same thing, right? That vault is encrypted. So everything in it is, you know, unreadable unless you happen to know my one password to unlock it. And if you do, it's pretty amazing. And in fact, I'll tell you exactly what it is. It's my password for the enterprise bulletin board system that I signed up for in 1985 maybe. And they had this really long password. It was the first bulletin board I ever signed into. And it was this really long, convoluted password that they gave you and you couldn't change it. And so I had to memorize it. And if anybody else knows it, well, you know, I guess have at it, there you go. So yeah, so that's the, it's smart to have a picture of your passport and your IDs. I mean, I wind up using these things more often than I expected, right? Because it's just super handy to have those things around. I mean, an album and your another thought would be take a picture of it and make an album in your photo library. My only concern with that is, and yeah, is that it is not, if someone gets access to your computer or your photos, if you're using iCloud Photo Library in order to sync to all your devices, then that's accessible on the web, right? In plain text, if you will, I mean, plain picture, as long as someone logs in, right? It's not encrypted from prying eyes at the server level. So, you know, that would be my only concern. Okay, and likewise, last pass, so I'm looking right now, so last pass has a secure notes feature as well. And I'm looking right now, so I have my healthcare ID, I have my driver's license, I have my passport, I have my social security card. Oh, and I have the Mac Observer credit card here. Hold on, let me read that back to you. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Yeah. I'm gonna go on a shopping spree. But no, it's interesting. Somebody told me that some states now actually allow you to put your ID in your Apple wallet. Yeah, there's only a couple of them, but you're right. Yes, there are some that do and they will accept that. So, yeah, like whether your state officially accepts it or not, or whether, you know, the border patrol or immigration control would let you back into the U.S. with just a picture of your passport, if you lost it, you know, it's hard to say, right? Probably not in the latter, perhaps in the former, but it's a start, it's something. And I also recommend that in addition to storing the picture, that you also store your passport number, your driver's license number, your expiration date, any identifying, you know, numbers on this thing so that you've got those stored in your, whatever, your, you know, your one password or your last password or your note, whatever it is, just so you've got them there. Again, if you lose your passport in France, for example, the best thing is to go to the U.S. Embassy, right? I mean, that's procedure to get one back. I know, as I'm sure you do, John, I know plenty of people that have gone through this, they lose their passport, they go to the U.S. Embassy, you lose a day of your vacation, but you're able to return home without any issues. And there you go. So, yep, yep. And having that. I'm gonna toss in. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I'm gonna toss in a cool stuff out. So I was talking to one of the vendors at my local adult beverage stores. And as you probably know, Dave, but there's a barcode on your driver's license. And there's an app that he told me about because I actually experimented with this. So there's a barcode on most driver's licenses. Or I think it's pretty much a standard, but there's an app called scanner, S-C-A-N-N-R that he told me about. And it basically reads the barcode on your driver's license and tells you all of the information that's contained within it. So what's the name of the app against? Just say it one more time so I can get it in the show notes for us, John. S-C-A-N-N-R. If you go in the app store, you'll see it. It has a limited number of free uses and then you have to throw them some money. But it basically parses the barcode on a US driver's license and tells you all of the information contained with it. What was funny is that he showed me a fake ID that he had received because we're in a college town. And he showed me a fake ID that had a picture of a young man on the front. And it was from a state that wasn't Connecticut. But when he read the barcode, it was like the name of... The information was totally different. So whoever made the fake ID just put a barcode on the back and figured that nobody would scan it. S-Right. S-So... No, it was fun. The thing that concerns me, Dave, is that these barcodes are in no way, shape or form, encrypted or secure or anything. Is that you could and I have made up my own. But it's interesting. I ran it and it's like, yeah, all right, your name is John Braun and here's your date of birth and your height and all the stuff that's on the license as well. But... S-Oh, I got to check that out. That's pretty cool, huh? S-Yeah, yeah. S-Cool. All right. One more question. It's not the last question. It's just more because it's what we do here. Felix writes, he says, I compose music for film and television and I have some old projects that I need to archive. They are a couple of hundred gigabytes in size or so. I don't foresee ever needing them again, but I also don't want to destroy them. What do you suggest as an option I was considering was buying a Blu-ray drive and some Blu-ray discs and taking that route to burn them? The other option, yeah, I know, I feel the same way, John. He says the other option- We'll talk about why in a moment. Yep. He says the other option I was considering is Amazon S3, Amazon Web Services. He says, I haven't set up an account or anything, but I was considering Amazon as it seems to be, by far, the lowest cost cloud option and have a decent internet connection. Cost here is a key factor as this is data that I don't wish to pay 10 bucks a month to keep forever. The next part of my issue, oh, and then we'll kind of go through that later. So, yeah, this is an interesting thing, right? For archiving Amazon, I think specifically Amazon Glacier would probably be the right answer price-wise, but here's the thing and the reason both John and I sort of, you know, reacted poorly to the idea of Blu-ray is that any sort of local storage is susceptible to any sort of issues, right? And Blu-ray, you know- Well, it's more optical media will fail. Well, no. Well, any media will fail. Correct. Optical media has a lifetime, so that's why I kind of made my noise there when he said Blu-ray, because the thing is Blu-ray or any optical media, especially rewritable, will fail. The mechanism that is used to burn the data will eventually get kind of wonky and it's not gonna last forever, but no media does, so continue. Now, I think I've heard of this Amazon thing. It's funny because you would think, why would I name a product Glacier? I mean, it makes it sound like it's, you know, like, older, like. Yeah, right. Well, it's, it's, it moves slowly, right? And that's the idea. You can upload to it, but to get data from it, you sort of have to make a request and then you get it, it's, I mean, it's not that slow, but you get it within 24 hours or maybe even less, but it's not instantly available online all the time. And then for that reason, I think they're able to charge quite a bit of less for it. So, so there you go. But any kind of local storage, any kind of storage will fail, right? You know, optical disks have their problems, hard drives have their problems, right? In fact, you know, we know that a hard drive sitting on the shelf for more than six months without having been spun up will, you know, almost certainly begin to suffer what we call bit rot, right, where data, you know, starts not being the same anymore and that's bad. So if you're going to do this locally, you want to have multiple copies and you want to routinely confirm that bit rot has not happened on any of them. One way would be if you had some sort of a NAS device, man, that's the place to just dump this kind of data. That's what I do. And I've got, I mean, I've got stuff on my, you know, various NAS devices, network attached storage for those of you that didn't already know what NAS meant. I use Synology devices, but there's QNAP and Drobo and, you know, we've talked about those in recent episodes. I store all kinds of stuff there and I just start putting more drives in and if a drive dies, it's not a big deal because these things all employ some variant of a RAID where they are fault tolerant and I can just fix, you know, replace the drive like John talked about in the last episode and we're good to go. So, you know, and it's online all the time, which means, you know, in theory, you can be checking it to see if there's any bit rot. Drobo does automatic data scrubbing. Synology, you can configure automatic data scrubbing. This is where it goes through and actually checks to make sure the data that we think is on the drive is still on the drives. This is a good thing to do for exactly these reasons, but I would not rely on something that just sits on a shelf. And as I say that, I pause because I'm thinking, oh, I do have old stuff that's sitting on a shelf on CDs and yeah, maybe I don't. So one thing to think is you wanna detect bit rot or things degrading, how do you do that? So at least with carbon copy cloner, they have a feature which I've engaged as of late and it takes time, but there's a little check box that they have in carbon copy cloner and it says find and replace corrupted files. And you can tell it how often to do that. And basically I think as far as I know, what it does is it's like, well, let me compare what's on this drive with the drive that you put the stuff on and if it's different, we're gonna deal with it. I haven't had it come up with an error yet. So I trust that my data between the two is consistent. Now, of course, it's not really archiving, but it is doing a verification. The other thing, Dave, I don't know if you ever heard of these guys and maybe this isn't appropriate for this use case, but there's a bunch of people that I dealt with in the corporate space called Iron Mountain and they do all sorts of things. I think they started with like, actually archiving physical documents, but then they moved into the digital age and they seem to claim to be able to do this sort of thing for you. But again, I think that they're more a corporate big boy operation versus something for an individual. But hey, maybe check them out. Yeah, the reality is you can't just, if you care about the data, you can't just put it somewhere and assume that it will be there in X number of years when you go to get it. Oh yeah, spread it far and wide. I think is the best strategy. Don't put it in any one place as we've indicated. A single backup is not terrible, but it's... Yeah, you wanna spread your data out, put it off site, multiple cloud, local storage, off site. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, you just, don't ignore it, I think is the best advice I can give. Or if you're gonna ignore it, pay someone else to pay attention to it. And in a sense, that's what you're doing with a service like Amazon, Glacier, any of these cloud storage services, I haven't heard of any of them losing someone's data, my guess is if we did, then that would be the end of that service. But who knows, I might have missed something. But that is their job, right? They don't just store your data in one place, they store it in many, many, many places and replicate it and encrypt it if you want and all of that good stuff. But it is up to someone else to make sure your data does not sit and rot, it's actively maintained and managed. So there you go, yeah. All right, moving on to Joe here, John, because Joe, I love questions like this, this is kind of geeky. He says, I have an oldie, but maybe one worth repeating on the show. He says, I have two, three monitor setups for my MacBook Pro, one at work, at work there are two 27 inch monitors and then the MacBook Pro screen arranged 27, 27 MacBook Pro, I'm assuming that's left to right. He says, at home I have a Dell widescreen which rotates 90 degrees, then an iMac used as a display in target display mode and then the MacBook Pro. It has been a pain with Apple's built-in controls to manage this because apparently it just counts the number of monitors and so I have to complete because there's three in both cases, I have to completely reconfigure the monitor arrangement each time which is a pain. Today he says, I remembered Switch Res X or Switch Res 10, which had been previously mentioned on the show before and behold, by using the display, sets that it has, this is all handled with a quick menu bar selection. So this is sort of a cool stuff found reprise perhaps, but he says, I have two questions. Number one, I would like to use something like the locations feature to have Switch Res X automatically set, but so far unable to figure out how to make this work. And number two, I would like to have the desktop image set automatically based on the above as the setup doesn't allow a common group of images. This seems like a new feature of Switch Res X, which I'm submitting, he says, but any more immediate solution would be appreciated. So you know me, anytime I'm tasked with automating something on the Mac that doesn't have a bespoke method of automation, I think about keyboard maestro and because it can trigger from a set of, from any number of triggers. So it could be, you know, your IP address, your IP range, your Wi-Fi network, whatever, something that is unique to home and unique to the office. And then once you're on that, boom, have it choose the thing. And the cool part about keyboard maestro is it can script or it can automate apps that are not built to accept automation by using user interface scripting. So it can, you know, it can go and click on a menu for you and choose it, right? And there you go. So that's what I would do. And I think that would work fairly well. So it's just worth remembering. So. Okay. Of course there's the, you know, built in either Apple script or automator. I don't know if, which for as 10, I'm going to, I'm going to fight with you on this. I think it's 10, but I don't know if they expose their API to automator, but if they do, that's great. You can do user interface scripting with those two, but how would you trigger it, right? How would Apple script or automator know to launch itself to do whatever it is? I mean, that's the question here is how do we automate this? So that when he plugs in at home, it switches to this new Switchres 10 set. No, you're right. Right. No, you're right. With either one, you'd have to, both environments that you create an app, but you'd have to launch the app in order to do something smart. To do the something. And so that's why I always fall back to keyboard maestro. Yep. Yep. As I say, it's, you know, to me, the future of automation, it's the present of automation on the Mac, but well, I mean, really, there's nothing that is more universal than that right now, which is weird. I mean, it's a third party app. I mean, Apple should be whatever. I mean, it's, you know, they don't, it's fine, whatever. And I got to get with the program because I'm having your keyboard maestro in quite a while. You would love keyboard maestro, man. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You would love it. Where are we here? Time, everything. Yep. You know, I want to take a minute and do our, or talk about our third sponsor here, my friend. And that is JamfNow, J-A-M-F dot com slash M-G-G where you get your first three devices free for life. What do I mean by that? Well, JamfNow makes it easy to set up, manage and protect all of your Apple devices, right? It's easy to keep track of your own Mac when it's right in front of you, your own iPhone, your own iPad. You're using them all the time, no problem. But what about other people's devices, right? You've got a business. You have to manage people's devices. Maybe that, that is your business, but maybe it's not your business but you still have to do it anyway because that's what happens. And as your business grows, you add more people, you've got more devices to manage. It's a headache. Trust me when I say this, even me as a geek, I know how to do all this stuff. I don't want to have to think about it because I've got other things that I have to think about. Like I like thinking about it when we're doing this show. But when I'm doing all the other stuff that I have to do throughout the week, you know, sometimes the geek time, there ain't no time for geek time. That's what JamfNow takes care of. They employ Apple's mobile device management so that you can just go to a website, manage all of the Apple devices under your purview from anywhere, anytime, and you can do things like distributing new Wi-Fi settings, distributing new email settings, you can deploy apps. You can even remote lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere. It's really, really cool. And like I said, you can have any number of devices logged in or attached to your JamfNow account, but the first three devices at all times are free. So if you just have three devices in there, it doesn't matter what three they are, you can change them out, it's no problem. Those are free. If you need more than three devices, you can add more starting at just $2 a month per device, which is pretty good, especially considering the headache it takes away. So check it out. Go create your free account today at jamf.com slash mgg. That's jamf.com slash mgg. And our thanks to JamfNow for sponsoring this episode. All right, man. Let's go to Danny. Shall we, Mr. Braun? We shall. Okay. Danny writes, he says, and I've been listening to your podcast for several years. It's like having the Genius Bar on the go. I like that. I'm gonna use that. Yeah. That's awesome. Thanks, man. He says, I wanted to share my recent very disappointing experience with Nuance's Dragon 6 for Mac. I've used previous versions of this dictation software, which had never been problem free, but worked reasonably well for me, not a fast typist. I recently upgraded my hardware to a 2017 MacBook Pro and OS 10.13.6, AKA High Sierra. I upgraded to Dragon 6 and found it was crashing on launch frequently. I contacted Nuance Support and was told there was a known problem and they suggested downloading an update, update to 6.0.8, which solved the crashing problem. But I then discovered that the editing commands don't work. Again, Nuance Support and they told me they've been working on the issue but have no answer. I discovered that this problem has existed since December, which essentially means they are selling a product that is not fit for its purpose. Because I would advise other MGG listeners to steer clear of this product, which is not inexpensive and does not work as claimed. If you have any suggestions for an alternative to Dragon for Mac, then I would like to hear about it. So, this is certainly a geek challenge. If anybody has experience with any other dictation software, I know there's not many options out there. And this is not the first time this has happened in a general sense. I remember Mac Speech, which I think was purchased and baked into Mac, by Nuance and baked into that, but I could be wrong about that. Nuance went on a spending spree and absorbed a lot of the other companies. And so I think they're kind of the only game in town from a commercial standpoint. But I remember, I mean, there's serious, I mean, the thing is there is the dictation built into the OS, right? Yep, totally, totally, yeah. Give that a spin. I mean, I've played with speech recognition. I've never warmed up to it because it just didn't do the trick for me, though for certain people, it's your only option. Yeah, it's your only option. For people, well, disabilities and all that. I have a lot of online friends that they can't type. If you're vision, if you can't see where you're typing, then you need something else like speech recognition, but the state of the technology, but I haven't tried the Apple stuff in a while. I may have to revisit it. It works, it's limited, the amount of time that it will listen and parse is limited. It will just stop after, I feel like it was just a couple of minutes the last time I used it. So that may or may not serve your purposes. But yeah, like I said, I remember it was a decade, maybe a decade and a half ago now where Mac speech almost went under because they had spent all this money retooling things for whatever version of Mac OS it was at the time. Apple released the next version of Mac OS and it completely borked it. Not even problems like this, but just didn't work and it took them months, if not year to just engineer their way out of that and then they had a big financial hole that they had to dig themselves out of, which they did. And to their credit, they were actually quite awesome about it. But this seems to keep happening because in order to do this stuff, you've got to tie in deeply with the OS, I suppose. So yeah, there you go. Good. Yeah, John. Yeah, no, I just did a quick search and I'm not finding a lot here other than Apple saying, hey, try ours. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that's the hard part, right? If Apple's works for 80% of the market, it doesn't leave a lot of room for a third party to really thrive unless they can really target a niche, right? Riches are in the niches, right? That's what I say sometimes. Anyway, yeah, there you go. So hopefully, if you have a suggestion for Danny, send it into us. Our feedback at mackeekab.com address is always open for you. I don't know if I heard you quite right, but I thought you said feedback. Whoa. Feedback at mackeekab.com. Yeah, and for anybody having... I did and I agree with you, but if you had trouble understanding, John, it is feedback at mackeekab.com unless you are a mackeekab premium subscriber at... And then you get to use the premium at mackeekab.com address. Premium at mackeekab.com, of course, is something that we prioritize when emails come in to that address because you folks are supporting us directly. We take care of you first, but the not secret is that we try to go through everything every week. And most weeks, 50 out of 52 weeks of the year, I would say we succeed. That said, I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium contributors that came in this week. If you want to learn more about mackeekab premium, you can do that at mackeekab.com premium. It is not a mandatory thing. If you cannot or are not interested in contributing there, don't worry about it. You can support the show in other ways. You're helping out by sending in questions, helping out by sending in tips, and cool stuff found simply listening helps because then we're able to have sponsors as well. So it really... There is a holistic approach to this whole thing, but if you are interested in ABLE, we are very thankful for that. And so on the monthly $10 plan, I want to thank Chris... We want to thank Chris F, Paul M, Mike C, Mark R, Ryan M, Neil L, Dave C, Scott F, Abdullah B, John G, Frank A, James C, and Jay C, no relation. Also Bob at Working Smarter for Mac users, and Micah P on the monthly plan, but at $15 instead of 10. So thank you. Thank you. And then on the biannual 25 every six month plan, we have Joe B, Pierre Timo A, Eric R, Drake Z, Stephanie E, and the Terry O'Brien show. So thank you to everyone who contributed and supports us in whatever way you do, and especially a special targeted thanks here to those of you whose contributions came in this week. All right, we got time here. This is good, John. This is good. You know, every now and then I, and I like this, I have my mind blown a little bit and Doug, Douglas, so sorry, are you okay? No, your mind was blown. Oh yeah. Yeah, totally blown. Yeah, no, it's good. I like this. Yeah, yeah. Doug, you know, don't work your mind too much, man. No, it's good to work the mind. It's better than the alternative. Yeah, but don't blow it. I mean, don't blow it is what I'm saying, because then we don't have a show. Yeah, I gotta go and get it straightened out. I gotta go back in the isolation tank, man. Yeah, exactly, good things rewired. Yeah, so Douglas sent in a note, and it really kind of, it did really blow my mind. He says, he was asking about Sonos speakers, but it certainly would target those, but AirPlay 2 is sort of the wild card here that really, constantly is making me rethink things, the whole concept of AirPlay 2. So he says, last year I bought a new 5K iMac. I wanted a good speaker to go with it for when I watched movies on my Mac. He says, I'd heard you talk a lot about Sonos, so I bought a Sonos Play 1 to my dismay. He says, of course, I found out that the Sonos Play 1 is basically its own self-contained music player speaker and not something that I can plug in as a general speaker for my iMac. He says, this was totally my mistake. I thought a speaker is a speaker is a speaker, but it turns out I have a lot to learn about speakers. He says, unfortunately, the Sonos Play 1 cannot be updated to be compatible with AirPlay 2, but the similar form factor Sonos 1 is compatible with AirPlay 2 and can be used to sync with the Play 1. This is true. You can't stereo pair them, but you can sync them. He says, so here are my questions. Can the Sonos 1 be used for sound when watching files with VLC, Netflix, Amazon Prime, MLB, YouTube, et cetera, through AirPlay 2 from my Mac? And number two, would you recommend the Sonos 1 considering I already have the Play 1 or would you recommend the new Sonos Beam? Please note that I do not use a TV and view all of my content on my Mac. Or number three, should I use a different speaker system entirely, such as USB speakers rather than a Sonos on my Mac, and just use the Sonos Play 1 that I already have for music? If possible, I would like to continue with the Sonos because I really like how they sound, but if it's not the best solution for what I want, I'm happy to consider something else. So this is where my mind was a little bit blown because I've been using Sonos for years and started with them long before they had AirPlay 2, right? I mean, that only came out a couple of months ago. And I never really thought of using them, like there's always been this separation between my Sonos system and my computing speakers. But if I rewind to the day I started with Sonos, there was also a separation between my Sonos system and my home theater speakers. That has now fallen away because Sonos has since come out with things like the Play Bar and then the Play Bass and now the Beam. And the Beam is truly, in my opinion, the best of those three and also the least expensive. So that's great. And I never really thought about using it on the Mac because up until a couple of months ago, that wasn't an option, at least not in any realistic way without hacking something together. But with AirPlay 2, you really can use a speaker as an AirPlay 2 speaker as your Mac's speaker. Now, I have not done this in any extended test yet. So I can't speak to how well Mac OS deals with something like this. Does it lose the AirPlay 2 speaker? Or does it just remember it as the output device all the time? That sort of thing could be a headache for any AirPlay 2 speaker. Sonos certainly is the one right now, but HomePod is another, right? So would this remember or would you have to constantly be going and reselecting the speaker? And if so, then maybe that opens up the door for someone like Rogue Amoeba to write an app to make an AirPlay 2 speaker persist on your Mac because they seem to be good at things like that. So this was just one of those mind-blowing things. And to answer your question, yeah, it's doable. We don't know how smooth it would be because we're sort of on somewhat uncharted waters here. They're new waters at least. Which one should you get if we're trying to decide between a Sonos one and the Beam? It depends on how far away you're going to be watching or listening from. If you're going to be right there at your desk, I'm not sure it matters. If you're going to be more than a few feet away, if you're going to say sit in a chair, sit on a couch and sit back and watch on your 27-inch iMac, then I would almost certainly say go with the Beam. But to answer your other question, especially since these are uncharted waters, if you don't want to navigate these and be the test case for the rest of us, I would say check out a pair of like Audio Engine A2 Pluses that you can plug right into your Mac. You don't even need them in there. You just plug them in. You're good to go. Those speakers sound great. They're relatively small. They don't have a center channel. So you might get some weirdness with regards to how movie audio comes out of it, but it's probably going to work out OK. So those are my thoughts on this. I'm curious what... I know you've taken a different path, John. So I'm curious what you think about all this and what you think about AirPlay 2. My path is different. Yeah. So one, I think it's... So it sounds like we're not isolating ourselves to watching movies just on the iMac, but this is the use case that we're talking about here. Right. Right. The other thing I've seen, Dave, I'll toss in one random thought here is that I have been getting... So we love the guys at Yamaha, and I've been getting emails about... And this is actually a topic that I think we should discuss at some point once the market matures, but there are actually... We'll call them receivers. So there are boxes, and I have one right now. It's a Sony. That basically takes your input and output to your HDTV and Apple TV and whatever and deals with it. And actually, they did send me something, and I did a bit of research. And the thing is there are receivers that you can manage your home with that actually have AirPlay built into them. I don't think any of them have AirPlay 2 yet. I thought... But they might. I thought I got something from Yamaha. Yeah. If anyone does, it's Yamaha. You're totally right. Yep. Yeah. So the cool part of this would be, could you get a receiver, which is basically an audio-video switch, right? And if it has AirPlay built in, so they got a license from Apple, I guess, or figured out how to hack it, kind of like Synology does with their video station. But I'm very interested in the concept of a receiver that supports AirPlay, because to me, that sounds like it would solve a lot of problems. If you have a setup... I mean, that is a... If you have a setup where you are relying on a receiver, right? I mean, not... And I don't want to say that's the old way of doing things, although it is the old way. I mean, with audio, we talked about this in the last episode. Old does not necessarily connotate bad. In fact, in a lot of cases, you know, there's some... It works. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But, you know, people setting up home theaters today, generally, at certain levels, are not considering the old receiver with separate speakers route, right? Well, I mean, like, it's not... There's nothing wrong with it. It's just that there's also now things like, you know, we talked about with the Sonos Beam and soundbars and stuff that just take that problem and solve it internally. Like, it becomes... Your soundbar becomes... Or your TV becomes your switchbox, and then you just have this thing that outputs sound. Because you don't really need... In many cases, you don't need a receiver because what devices are you switching between, right? If everything's going through your TV, and then you've got music just targeted at this receiver, if you have an AirPlay speaker that also is connected to your TV, well, you know, what do you need a receiver for is the question, right? You know, it sort of consolidates these things. But there are plenty of homes that use receivers still and plenty of homes that will continue to use receivers. So, yeah, something like this. I'm looking... Yeah, I'm actually seeing a lot of Denon and Marantz stuff that will support AirPlay 2, but I'm not seeing anything from Yamaha, but I'd like you, I'm... There's something in my head that says Yamaha. They've got to be working on it. Come on, these guys know what they're doing. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's still a challenge, I think. So, right now, so my receiver, for example, has three sources. It's my Blu-ray player, my Apple TV, or my Tivo. Yep. And then the output is wired speakers. And I can fiddle with it. You know, the Apple TV, of course, can send audio to other devices. But no, it's still a complex landscape, I guess, that I'll back away from this by saying that. Yeah, no, it's true. There's a million different ways to do this, and you just need to figure out the one that works for the way you... For A, the way you want to run your home, and B, the gear you already have. I mean, if you can leverage stuff that's already there, and if you've already got a receiver setup where you've got speakers you like and all that stuff, well, then you could replace that with an AirPlay 2-compatible receiver and you're good to go. Or you could replace it with something like that new Sonos amp, right, that's just going to drive your speakers and also has an HDMI port. And now, boom, that becomes your receiver, essentially. You know, and there you go. And your TV is your switchbox. So there's a million different ways to do it. Yeah, that's right. You might be a good candidate for that Sonos amp when that thing comes out, man. Because you've got the... Right, I mean, that would maybe replace what you've got going on. I don't know, it's all very interesting. Because actually the talk of AirPlay-compatible receivers made me consider, so the one I have right now, which you've seen it and it works fine, I actually got it as an open box special at Best Buy for like a really good price. And it does everything I need. It has multiple HDMI. You know, it does all the sound stuff. It decodes the sound that we had some fun with that a little while ago. It depends on the channel. Yeah, it's still a mess. Yeah. But it's just like, you know, like you're saying here, as soon as you start factoring AirPlay 2 into all of this, it's like, oh, wait a minute. There's a lot more. Like it's just the options are, I mean, not endless because you're only limited to Apple devices as your source. But still, it's like, oh yeah, there's so much flexibility here that just wasn't here a year ago. And certainly there was AirPlay, but AirPlay 2 really sort of opens things up. So it's interesting. It's interesting. All right, we have Jed here. Which has, Jed actually has a question that we talked about and then maybe we even have an answer. Jed says, asks, my sister has a beach house. The internet there is terrible for two reasons. One is the provider. Can't fix or help with that. Second is the router they provided. The Wi-Fi doesn't reach her bedroom. The beach house is not huge and she's not going to dish out some 300 plus bucks for a mesh system. So I'm debating whether to advise her to get a new router that's just stronger and maybe will reach the bedroom or to get an extender. I seem to remember within the last year, you said you found some that you actually liked. He says, I tried using my various power line adapters I had lying around. He says, who doesn't love to get more life out of a product you already paid for? But for whatever reason, based on her wiring, it did not work there. So here's the thing, right? He's right. There are plenty of wireless extenders that can work now. Here's the thing, right? Years ago, not that many years ago, we found and came to the conclusion that wireless extenders all sucked. It didn't really help. They just took a bad signal. So WDS was the standard that supposedly let you extend your wireless. Most of them didn't use that though. Most of them just use regular Wi-Fi. They attached as a client and broadcast. What I see where you're going is that the basic technology or the speed of it was the problem. Was the bottleneck. But continue. Yeah, right. I think I know where you're going with this. No, you're exactly right. Yeah, whether they were using WDS or not was irrelevant because the fundamental tech using 802.11, BG, even N, wasn't quite enough to create a backhaul. And this is why we didn't have wireless mesh systems available until very recently. And the foundation, the thing that all of these things can leverage to actually make it work, is 802.11ac, right? You can have a weak 802.11ac signal that provides way more bandwidth than most people will need. And that is especially if you've got these things that are plugged into the wall. They can use slightly more powerful radios. They're in fixed locations. They can have CPUs in there that are more powerful than what you've got in your phone. And that sort of thing, these things can really work. And it's why mesh systems work. And one of the beauty, mesh systems are essentially extenders with smarts, right? A coordination and smarts. So they all know about each other. They can sort of adapt themselves to making things work. But at the core, it's just using the available radio technologies. And 802.11ac is the vehicle that really allows them to shine. And you can make your own as Jed infers or implies for less money. And so as long as her router supports 802.11ac, which is you need to make sure because some older routers don't. But as long as a router does, then get an 802.11ac extender. And you can usually do that for less than 100 bucks. You've got to configure it. You're on your own to do that too, right? So this is where you're trading some headache for spending less money. It's just how life works. But there's not that much headache. And I've had good luck with extenders from both Netgear and TP-Link. John, I think you've used extenders from TP-Link with success. Yeah, we tried it one time. And it was a, yeah, because it's supported AC. And it had a lot of features. It would show you signal strength and the throughput and stuff. So it did a really good job. And they had an iOS app and all that stuff. Or you could connect directly to it. But it would tell you, it's like, here's the situation. Are you happy with this? And it's like, okay, yeah. But because the backhaul or the RF channel had enough oomph versus prior standards, that's why these were... That's why it's feasible. Acceptable. Yeah, exactly. So he did, he wound up getting a TP-Link AC 1200 range extender, the RE355, which I think you can get on Amazon right now for 58 bucks. And boom, he said he's happy, everything's good. And life is good. So that's the trick. So yes, range extenders, unlike 10 years ago, we're good. So did you just adjust your headphones? I heard a weird echo. So make sure. I mean, I've made a weird noise. No, I'll do that right now. I thought it was an echo. That's fine. No problem. The only other thing I'll say is that if it's feasible, you will always get better performance with a hardwire. Either gigabit ethernet or now we have 10 gig ethernet and some of the newer Macs, right? Like the new iMac Pro, which is... Where is that thing? I don't know. But if you can hardwire, if you can plug into your router or switch and get a gigabit connection, that's the best solution, but that's not always, unfortunately, feasible. I agree with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can do it, but it's going to cost you a lot of coin versus getting an extender. Yeah. Well, and it's a big pain in the neck. Trying to drape ethernet through your walls or however you need to do it. A lot of these extenders, you're going to get several hundred megabits per second in most scenarios and perhaps a lot more than that. And that's great. I think we talked about this for the other day, but I noticed that the other day I was doing Netflix and on the Tivo, if you hit the info button, it'll show you and at least for HD content, I think it's like five megabits a second. Yeah, it's just, I think it's like four and change. I think you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, and then you told me, I think 4K is, well, 25 by 4, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, right. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so. So, AC will handle that easily if it's a reliable connection. AC will handle 4K, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've tested AC connections between two routers, so two fixed position devices with external antennas, powered devices, so they're not trying to be overly power-efficient to manage battery life or anything. And I've gotten across one floor up and clear the other side of the house, I've gotten several hundred megabit connections between two devices like that. Well, for video and audio, that's, yeah, for a single, for a movie, that should be just great. I mean, you could do, I mean, you know, over 100 megabits, you can do four 4K streams. So, yeah, there's plenty of bandwidth. It really, yeah. So, yes, extenders can be the answer if you're really just looking to kind of eke out a little extra performance and you don't care to have all the bells and whistles and unified management of a mesh. Are you even doing 4K? I mean, I'm HD and, you know, I'm happy with the quality of my, you know, I got an LG TV and I got all the HD stuff. I mean, 4K, I'm sure my next TV will be 4K. Well, I've seen the cost of them. When I've seen the cost of some of them, though I shy away from the smart TVs because I don't want my TV to be smart, I want it to be stupid. I just want it to be a screen that shows me pretty pictures. I don't want anything else on my TV. That, that's just me, all right. Yeah. I mean, you just said you like to watch Netflix. So if your TV had Netflix built in, why not, right? Well, because my TV has it, but, you know, along with everything else. Yeah, right. Exactly. But if it didn't, then yeah, no, I couldn't understand the argument for a smart TV, but they have the thing about it spying on you. Everything's going to spy on us, John. Well, the TV, the TV is probably spying on me, too. It definitely is. It's monitoring what you watch to give you suggestions. Right? You know. But no, I have, so we started years ago with a plasma, I can't remember, maybe 2006, I want to say. We got a 42 inch plasma and we love that in the living room. And that's actually still working in our playroom today. Purity. Panasonic? Yep. Panasonic, exactly. And then we upgraded to a 60 inch plasma, the final year of Panasonic's plasma line. They announced they were end of life in plasma. I knew based on our, just the layout of the rooms that we watch TV in at home, also our preferences, I knew that we weren't going to be happy with LED the viewing angle, both. Really? Yeah. Well, both, plasma has a better viewing angle than LED. I don't know the contrast, I think, is superior. The right, the black point or whatever the contrast. It depends. Yeah. I mean, we wound up buying a top of the line Panasonic Plasma in their final year. But it's not just the viewing angle from left to right, but also top to bottom. There's a narrow range where things look good on LED, and then there's a much wider range with plasma. So, my goal at that point, and it wasn't all that expensive. In fact, I think our 60 inch was half the price of what we paid for 42, whatever, five years before, or whatever it was. But because that's just how life works. And my goal is, and it was and still is, is to skip LED and go right from plasma to OLED, right? At the time, OLED was way too expensive. But my hope was, OK, I'll buy this plasma. It'll last me long enough to get to the point where when I need to replace it, OLED will be an affordable answer. And we're almost, you know, we're there. I mean, this experiment seems to be having success. So yeah, so the next time we need a TV, I'll go to OLED, and then we're good to go. Yeah, OLED is, as we call it. Well, I've seen that, that's the future in the CES events that I've been through as of late. They're saying that's the way they're going to go. And once they ramp up production, then the price is going to go, you know, plummet. We're already there. I mean, and it will just continue to get better. So yeah, so that's my plan. And I have no doubt that whatever TV we buy next would be a 4K TV. I mean, I just can't imagine that that would not be a feature of whatever we wind up buying it, not necessarily because we prioritize it, but it's just how it's going to be. You know, so like our current TV, our current Panasonic plasma is 3D capable. It came with two 3D glasses. We have watched maybe an hour of 3D TV on that thing. My son and I did it because we could. And it was like, yeah, that's cool. Great. Yeah, that was kind of. That was a fad. Yeah, non-starter. It's like, I don't need 3D TV. Right. I mean, it's fun when you go to the movies. Like I remember when I watched Avatar, I went to IMAX Theater that had 3D and it was like, okay, that's worth it. But for everyday TV viewing. It's crazy. Do I need it? No, I probably don't. No. So Michael King in the chat room at MackieCab.com slash stream. Hello to everyone there that's joined us today says, he says, oh, LED is the way to go now. He says, I love my LG OLED. I no longer miss my plasma. And that's what I like to hear. That's how we do it. Yeah. And that is how we do it. It is that time. I hope you're a sheltering the band, Dave, because it's pretty nasty out. Is it? It was just sprinkling here when... There were branches down and... That's crazy. That's not good. Oh, actually, my neighbor was funny. I looked out the other day and I saw a branch that was probably about 20 feet across had been ripped from a tree on their property. And I could tell that was fresh because the wood was like not old. No, it was just that it was like a wind or like a gust that just like tore this branch off of the tree. And I'm like, wow, I'm glad that's not mine. Yeah, it happens. Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right. Let's see. Where now you threw me off. I love it. We told everybody the email address, but what else do we have? Visit our forums. Please, please come visit us there. MackieCab.com slash forums, or you can go to MackieCab server and just click on forums in the header there. We would love to see you there. It's really... That's home for us now. So please join us there. It's a good place. We get to tweak it as we want and as you want. And it's really a good thing for all of us. Of course, I want to thank all the folks at cashflycachefly.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. And I want to thank all our sponsors, as we mentioned during the show, Jamf now at jamf.com slash mggring.com slash mgigimazing.com slash mgg. Of course, the folks at Smile, at smilesoftware.com slash podcast, Barebone Software at barebones.com, Otherworld Computing, maxsales.com. That's how we're going to do it, man. That's how it is. Yes, John. Got to tell you one thing. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you got a storm coming, if it's windy, if it's raining, the thing is you want to listen. You want to pay attention. You want to get out of there because you don't want to get caught. Made out of magic. That's some good advice there, folks.