 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 712 for Monday, June 4th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show that takes your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, mixes it with whatever we've found during the week and delivers to you a beautiful salad of everything mixed together that is full of tasty morsels of learning, tasty cool things found, tasty answers to your questions, and a delicious bit of croutons on the top that we add so that each and every one of us can learn at least five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include LinkedIn, Talent Solutions, a new sponsor, we're at linkedin.com slash MGG, you get 50 bucks off your first job posting and smile. Happy birthday to Smile, they're 15 next week and PDFPenn 10s out. You can learn all about that at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. We'll talk more about both of those shortly here in San Jose, California. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairville, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. Hi, Mr. John F. Brown. I would assume based on what you just said that you do in fact know the way to San Jose. The pilot did. So, you know, actually, the pilot didn't. The pilot knew how to get to San Francisco as far as I know. And then Brian Chaffin came. He lives in San Jose, so he definitely knows the way here. And he came and picked me up at the airport and brought me downtown to my hotel. So it's all good. Curry, right? And Curry on the way. That's right. That was not. Yeah. Yeah. Good Curry. It was very, very specialized Uber service from Brian. Yeah. So this morning was the WWDC keynote, John. And and there's lots of things that were announced, right? And so and then right after the keynote is what I like to call keynote part two, AKA the platforms state of the union. And that's where they sort of dig into a little bit more of the behind the scenes of some of the things that they talk about sort of on the surface in the keynote. I find it really valuable to understand the technology and be to also kind of level set our what I call our BS meters so that when we see someone announced, hey, I'm going to use like this tech to do that. We can either say, yeah, like that's how it works or no, that's not how it works. We know better. We call BS foul, you know. And and so it really is helpful. Well, we'll talk through some of that here. So I think this is the first time that I've actually watched live what they call the platforms state of the union, which is the later event. Yeah, keynote, you talked about. Yeah. The thing is, I didn't know initially just to share with everybody here is although you can watch the keynote proper on your Apple TV or even online. Right. You can't for this other event. So how do you watch it? And you include me in there, Dave, is that there's a WWDC app, which is very nice, because one thing that it does is when the sessions are coming up, you can live stream them. And so I actually streamed it from my iPhone to my Apple TV, right? It was pretty darn cool. And it worked out. There was no, you know, no Chinese Chinese, they're remote. Their streaming broadcast this time around was exemplary. Oh, yeah, I agree. So I am and we'll go into a little quick tip here as part of this. But I watched the keynote for the first time in a long time. I watched the keynote not from within the press corral at the McHenry Convention Center. I watched it at Alt Conf and and really the reason was, you know, sometimes I'm on the the like auto invite list. And sometimes I'm not. And so these days I'm not on the auto invite list. But that's usually never a problem. I call up the folks at Apple PR and they usually take care of me. My problem was that I had no idea that invites had gone out because I was mostly detached from work that week doing my daughter's school play. I was playing drums. She was in the play. We did grease together and it was awesome. And I have absolutely no regrets about that. But it meant that I didn't even realize invites had gone out until last weekend. I asked my friends, well, my colleagues or the folks that I work with that I know and at at Apple PR and they tried their best. But they get a very limited number of of tickets and they had already sort of used their their extra allotment that I normally would be able to kind of weasel in on. And so I watched at Alt Conf, which was awesome. Alt Conf is a great venue conference, a place to assemble. And they had the stream there too. And it was it was actually fantastic, really comfortable in the room. The stream was great. No Wi-Fi in the room, largely because they needed to use the Wi-Fi for their stream. So they they they don't give us the Wi-Fi password until I think tomorrow, perhaps, but that was fine. Jeff Gammett and I found a spot where we could get a decent LTE signal in the room and we were going to share the LTE signal from his iPhone because he has an unlimited data plan that includes quite a bit of tethering. So great personal hotspot. We turn it on. I get connected. No problem. Like Jeff's iPad even offers to share his hotspot password with me because that's, you know, how iOS 11 works. Great. No problem. Jeff can't connect his own iPad. Yes, the very one that shared the password with me to my device. And it worked fine. But Jeff's iPad can't connect and he's having problems. So he reboots his iPad. He reboots his iPhone. No problem. No, no change. I can get I can get connected. No problem. He cannot connect to his own device. Like what the heck is going on? And then finally it hit me. I'm looking at our two screens side by side, John. And I realize I'm connecting to his via Wi-Fi. He's connecting via the separate personal hotspot link at the top of the Wi-Fi screen because it's part of his iCloud account, which dawned on me in the moment that, wait a minute, he's not using Wi-Fi. He's using Bluetooth. And there's too much Bluetooth traffic in this room for that to work. So I said, turn off Bluetooth on your iPad, which he did. Boom, got connected via Wi-Fi right away. No problem whatsoever. The lessons you learn right in the moment. I think the Bluetooth was interfering with the whole 2.4 gigahertz thing. No, it's that there was too much Bluetooth interference. Right. He couldn't get a Bluetooth connection between his. When you do personal hotspot to your own device, it tries Bluetooth first because it's lower power than Wi-Fi. And so it saves power on both your devices. But there was too much. I get what you're saying now. Yeah. So a hotspot you can connect via various means. Bluetooth, I think Wi-Fi and also USB, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, you want to. If you want. So what you're saying is that it gives the priority to Bluetooth, which may not be the best decision, which was not the best decision. Right. I mean, it could see it. So it was like, oh, cool, we can do Bluetooth. But there was just too much going on in the room. And so thankfully it dawned on me to have him turn off Bluetooth. And he got connected instantly. It was just like, dude, like, why doesn't it at least say that? Like there should be some fallback, right? Like I can't connect to that hotspot. Why didn't it try that direction? I don't know. But anyway, it's so there we go. So it worked. We were able to do our live coverage between us and actually Brian and John back in the home office. Of course, Brian's home office is, you know, four minutes down the road. But but it worked out great. We had some great coverage. We, you know, it's everything worked out swimmingly. And so, you know, that's that's how it goes. And I should say that our WWDC 2018 coverage this week sponsored by Jamf with Jamf Now Smile, IMAZING, Eero and Carbon Copy Cloner. They really stepped up and, you know, it takes a lot to do what we do and get out here and do all this coverage and gamuts going to be doing. Actually, we'll all be doing a lot of interviews all week and that kind of thing. And so it's good, right? Sweet. Thank you sponsors. Yeah. Yeah. So let's let's let's dig in if I can find this here. I'm trying not to type very much because because you'll hear too much typing noise just the way the sound is in this hotel room and everything. But anyway, let's talk about this, right? So the keynote was all about software. The platform State of the Union also always all about software. They spent almost an hour on iOS 12. They spent another 20 minutes on TVOS. And then, oh, sorry, another 20 minutes on WatchOS, then maybe about 10 minutes on TVOS and then 25 minutes or so on MacOS. So we don't necessarily need to prioritize it in the same way they did. But we might as well go in order. iOS 12, I have to say, I was really happy when the first thing they talked about with iOS 12 was how they were focusing on performance improvements. It's like, thank goodness, they don't feel like they have to release some whiz bang, new, different interface, glitzy, radical change to iOS. I think they are pressured into calling it iOS 12. But really what they put out today is iOS 11.5, right, which is exactly what they should have done. And it's great. Like they they're they're focusing on performance enhancements. It runs on all the same software or hardware, rather. And and I think that's fantastic. There are some new features in iOS 12, of course. But by and large, it's it's an under the hood update. And I think that's that thank goodness for that. Well, I think it's interesting because it seemed to be a meld of so one of the nice things about 12 is that first, it supports all of the devices that work on iOS 11, which is nice. And that's not the case for some other things we're going to talk about shortly. But that's cool. What I found interesting, though, is that the speed increases they were talking about. I'm wondering if it's just that they're coming up with better optimizations with X code and things like that. It's I think that's exactly what. OK, you know, they got a new environment and they figure how to optimize the code because it almost made me scratch my head and say, well, why couldn't you do this already? Well, I think that's the I think that's where do you find this extra speed? I mean, two to three, you know, a lot of things they said, you know, open two to three and some things 10 times faster. It's like, well, why didn't you do this in iOS 11? Well, because that's exactly my point, right? Is that, you know, when they push out a new OS like they did with iOS 11, there's so much stuff that they can't stop and spend the time on, you know, performance enhancements and those types of things. And I'm glad that they're not just stuck in the rat race of, you know, new feature, new feature, new feature. It's like, well, slow down. Like, let's get this right. And so I'm really glad they did that. Yeah. What I do think is interesting, especially in light of that app you're using on your Mac to control your processes. Say that again. App Tamer. Oh, yeah. What I thought was interesting is that one part of what they talked about with iOS 12 is they said, well, you know, we're going to kind of almost call it that it has a different profile and that they showed like a nice little graph. And they said, well, iOS 12 kind of ramps up its performance a lot quicker when it detects that it's needed, which probably was not the case in prior versions of the OS. So I think it's interesting is that they're kind of like app tamers, that they're kind of micromanaging or profiling what's happening there and doing it in a smart way. So I think that's cool. So that's all in the OS and not really the processor. So I guess, you know, they've, you know, profiled. Millions of applications has just looked, well, you know, where, where is what we're doing now? Not, not cutting the muscle. Not cutting, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I like that. I was, I was very happy about that. But, you know, some of the things that they added are cool. I'll kind of gloss over them. If there's things you want to talk about, John, obviously, let's stop. But, you know, the group FaceTime, which has also been added to the Mac, I think is fantastic. Like that, duh. But it'll be really nice for us, especially with with my daughter going off to college and all that stuff. The new Animoji features cool. I actually think it's more than cool. I think people are going to go bonkers over that stuff, especially the Memoji's, where you can create your own Animoji that looks like you and, you know, you can add all kinds of things. And so that, like, that's good. The new, you know, Snapchat, like filters that you can add into messages. Definitely, they need to do that kind of thing. So, I mean, there's some sparkly stuff that they've done and that's good. A.R.K. Go ahead. OK, well, it kind of, this kind of leans, leads into what you're sure. But anyway, so they talked about this collaboration to come up with this USDZ format, which was, as far as I can tell, it was Pixar, Apple and Adobe, all kind of collaborated on this. And it's a new standards are wonderful because you can almost come up with more. But it'll be nice to see that that, you know, they're proposing a standard that will be able to handle a lot of this 3D and and and A.R. stuff here. I agree. Yeah. Yeah, it's I think it's it's great. Now, somebody get jumpy and that Adobe is involved because, well, you know, Adobe. I mean, Adobe does a lot of great stuff. They just they also did flash, which at the time was great. I mean, it solved a very real problem that then needed to be solved in a different way. But but, you know, this A.R. Kit, too, where where you can have multiple devices sort of aware of and representing the same virtual environment is really cool, right? I mean, and if we think about this, right, you get now you can play a game with two people and or more to more than two people and you can have spectators watching with their devices so they can see the augmented reality field the same as the players do. Like this is cool. And if that's A.R. Kit, too, I feel like, you know, A.R. Kit 10 is like we're in ready player one world, which is, you know, I mean, it's fine. There's some social implications of that sort of world. Well, it's I mean, it's a you know, like it a fully virtualized world. What's that ready player one? I I loved the book and I felt like the movie was a fantastic fan fiction interpretation of the book. It was radically different in terms of of the specifics, right? Like radically different in terms of the specifics. If you if you read the book, you'd get the gist of what was going to happen in the movie. But but the specifics and I won't go into any more than that for people that haven't seen it. But the specifics are, you know, wholly different. But yeah, it was good. But like that to rent it. You should rent it. Yeah, you would like it. And I also highly recommend you read the book. No, before or after you see the film. I don't know that it would matter, but the book was it was was awesome. And Armada also his his next book was also really good. But and speaking of, if I may, yeah, go ahead. So speaking of new things, books were one of the things that were newly introduced here, though the the. So the message I want to communicate here is that, you know, this has always bugged me about the iPad versus my iPhone is they finally realized, hey, you know what, the apps that a lot of people really like that are on the iPhone. When do we put in the iPad? So they announced that I think they're going to do a stocks app now for the iPad, yeah, which they haven't voiced memos. Yeah, Apple Books, which I think is on both. But right. Well, I books now is called Apple Books, right? Yeah, or will be. Yeah, but but it always annoyed me that there were certain apps on one iOS device that weren't on the other. And there was no good technical reason that they couldn't have put them on there. But now they did. So now they get stocks and especially, you know, being someone that likes to play the market. I mean, their new interpretation of stocks, especially with the screen real estate on the iPad, kind of like others like E trade, you know, like a lot of the brokers that are out there have specialized apps for the iPad versus the iPhone. Because you get more real estate and you get more data. So it's nice to see them. I'm very excited about that. Just so they think it'll if you're a trader, I think it'll make your life easier and you can make better decisions. Maybe Lucky iOS 13, the iPad will get a calculator. I'm not kidding, right? It's ridiculous that there's no calculator. No count. Oh, my God, sure. Wait, no, isn't there if it isn't there on the shortcut screen? No, sir. Oh, my gosh. I guess I never never noticed that. OK. Taint there. So getting parity between the different iOS devices is another thing that they did. Well, and while we're on the subject of that, you know, they added those same four of those apps, stocks, news, voice memos and. Oh, what was the last one missing it? Dang it. But they added four for iOS apps to the Mac as part of step one, public step one of an integration of UI kit, which is previously an iOS framework added. They added some elements of UI kit to Mac OS 10.14, which is Mojave. They added that. And now they're making it more possible to compile iOS apps to run on the Mac. And that's what's happening with those four apps. The fourth of which I still can't remember, but it's been a long day. But but I think that's very interesting. And their plan is to offer this to developers. It's coming in 2019 for for the masses. Right now, Apple is doing it with their apps as a sort of a test. But by baking some of those UI kit elements into Mac OS, they're able to make it so that iOS apps can just be recompiled and will essentially run on the Mac. And that wouldn't make sense for every iOS app, of course, but it will make sense for a lot of them. And these these are very much. Good examples of that. So I I like that, you know, home. Thank you, everyone in the chat room at MacGicab dot com slash stream. It means the stream's working. It's the home app is the fourth one. Yeah, which is also like, thank goodness. But, you know, there's a reason the home app it didn't or the others, too. But there's a reason the home app didn't exist on the Mac. They didn't write a separate version of the home app for the Mac. And now we have a home app coming on the Mac and they also didn't have to write a separate version of the home app for the Mac. They just took this iOS version and compiled it there, which is kind of the point. So there you go. Yeah. Also in the chat room is brought up here from our friend brother Jay. They always have to take a stab at Android. And it was funny, though, though the the statistics that they mentioned were pretty amazing. And I have my notes here. Eighty one percent of devices, they say, are running the latest version of iOS. You know, how many are running the latest Android OS? It was like six percent or something. Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, that's that's a swipe. It is. It's a it's a legitimate swipe. It the platform is completely different, right? It's they're and I think the Apple is our market for the devices we use is better off with homogenization among the platform, like developers don't have to guess and write for six different things. Like it makes development way, way easier when everybody's on the same version. So so there were a couple of things and I wanted to dig into one on iOS 12. And this was actually not mentioned in the keynote, but it was mentioned in what I'll call keynote part two. The platform state of the Union is that iOS 12 now gets automatic strong passwords, even for passwords created within apps. So it for a lot and for a lot of apps, this is just going to become an automatic thing. If people are already invoking the iOS password libraries into their apps so that you can like use your your Yelp password from the web inside the app. If they're doing that, then that can go the other direction now. So if you update your password in the app or if you create a new account in the app, you can get the iCloud key chain or Safari passwords. We'll auto suggest a password in the app. It'll put it in there and then it'll save it. And it goes even deeper than that. You can invoke Siri to say, you know, hey, show me my Netflix password. That will work. That now has password reuse auditing, meaning iOS 12 will notify you if you have an issue using the same password on multiple websites. Right. And and security code auto fill in two ways. Number one, when you get that one time text message, you know, with the four digit code or whatever, it'll parse. Yeah, it'll parse that and put it in. But and this is where it gets really interesting. And Apple always kind of surprises me. So all of these things are like, wow, they're really going after, like, you know, one password and last pass, right? They're they're they're kind of taking that market, right? The more features like this that they are catching up. They're catching up. That's a great thing. That's a great way to put it. Yeah. But they've also added a new hook for third party password managers in iOS 12, meaning that like one password and last pass and all those don't have to hack their way in with the share sheet. They will be, you know, I don't I don't want to say there'll be first class citizens because I think it'll still be easier to integrate the iCloud key chain than it will this. But I think it's going to be a lot closer, right, to being a first class citizen the way this demo looked. So I'm really I'm excited about that. And I'd like that Apple is doing this and embracing where their market's going and what their customers are doing. And I'm with you because right now the current state on iOS is that the support, or at least that I've seen on using last pass is spotty. OK. And then it's some apps that I use, you know, I'll put in the username and the password and then I'll see a little icon there. Sometimes when I click on it, it's like, OK, well, you know, fill in your iCloud key chain. And I'm like, well, no, I don't really use that. Sure. Some other apps. And I guess the thing is right now it's kind of fragmented and that you have to intentionally include the API. So it sounds like they're creating a new baseline here saying, OK, well, if you adopt our API, right, we'll be. And, you know, I think the two only two players really now are one password and last pass. I know there are other other ones out there, but there's quite a few. Yeah, yeah, in practice, it would probably be worth doing a segment on that. But but yeah, I think there are two big boys out there. I think they are two major players. Yeah. And but allowing them to come into this, I guess, updated password management API to me is wonderful because. It's delicious. Yeah. Well, and also like similarly delicious is the integration of third party mapping apps into car play, right, which I think is stellar because that has always driven me crazy that, you know, and I don't I don't have a car play vehicle, but I rent them occasionally. And it, you know, car plays actually pretty awesome right up until the point where it's utterly frustrating, right, which is true about iOS in general, right. But one of the places where it's utterly frustrating is it's like, well, if you want to use car play, you're using Apple Maps. You're not using Google Maps. You're not using Waze. You're not, you know, none of those other things are they don't. But they have APIs for third party music players so you can have like downcast and overcast. Those were totally fine, you know, Pandora. And so now they've added the ability for that, which I am going to guess also means that third party mapping apps will come to watch OS very, very soon if it's not there already in watch OS five because it felt that that limitation has always felt in sync to me. But that's that, you know, it's pretty good. Let's let's jump to Mac. Well, actually, there's one more thing on iOS I wanted to talk about and and that's this shortcuts thing. Right. Is that what they're calling it? Shortcuts. Am I do I have that right? It was Siri wasn't Siri shortcut. Siri shortcuts. Yeah, Siri shortcuts. OK, so this is workflow, right. Apple acquired the workflow app and team within the last year. And now it's integrated into the OS, which is what we were hoping for. And you can do all of these great things and control the scripting, if you will, of various different apps and services inside iOS. And you can link them all together and invoke them with either the touch of a button or Siri with with voice. And I think it's fantastic that this is like I couldn't be happier about the way this is looking. I can't wait to play with it. So so there you go. That that's I think that's pretty good. Shortcuts. One more thing that I saw. Yeah, go ahead. You may have noticed screen time. Yeah. Shows what you did with the phone throughout the day. And the thing, especially as a parent, I think you may appreciate this, though your kids are. Oh, no, I'm going to use it to not limit my daughter's phone while she's at college. Yeah, it's going to be great. Hey, she could she's 18. She could buy her own phone and get her own plan. No problem. I would be like, what, are you like paying for it or something? Oh, yeah, I guess you are. Oh, yeah. But an app that profiles what you do and kind of is smart about it. And then that actually gets into the thing that was in the later talk, especially this machine learning stuff that actually kind of scared me. And maybe we want to mosey onto that part of it here. But I don't think there's anything else that I mean. There was WatchOS. I didn't really see that. I mean, I don't even have an Apple Watch. So I don't know if there was anything about WatchOS that really thrilled you. The walkie talkie thing. Sure. And in talking about it on daily observations with Jeff today, I realized two things. Number one, it's like, you know, the Dick Tracy Watch feature. And, you know, the joke I'll make is kids ask your parents if you don't know what that is. And then the second joke that I'll make is also ask your parents if you don't know what a walkie talkie is because I'm not sure that's the right name to use for this feature. It doesn't necessarily have relevance anymore. Well, it's a point to point short range. I know what it is. But what I'm saying is people don't use walkie talkies anymore. I mean, some people do, but most people, you know, it's not. I think you could still get them. I know. And if I recall, they're all on Channel 14, right? No, no, no. There's no change channels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think the basic models were Channel 14. They used to be. Yeah. But, you know, so let's let's move on to Mac OS here. We've already talked a little bit about it. Dark mode, I'm very happy to see it makes a lot of sense. It's always seemed weird to me that you can set your doc and your menu bar to be dark, but your apps are still, you know, bright and crazy. It was very evident in the room while we were all, you know, watching and taking notes during the keynote and people that were on iOS devices could do the smart invert and, you know, darken their screens. Whereas the people that were on Macs had to like, you know, dim their screens so that it wasn't the brightest thing in the world. So I'm very excited about dark mode. And and again, in the state of the Union, they they talked about how this isn't entirely automatic for third party apps. Apps will have to be slightly modified, augmented, perhaps is the right word to fully support dark mode. But the this is, you know, something that for most apps will probably be an, you know, a day's worth of coding or less versus, you know, complete rewrites. It could be an afternoon's worth of coding kind of thing. Right. Yeah, which is good. What they talked about after that, Dave, I am totally thrilled by which is. And if you don't know what it is, I'm going to tell you. They modified the behavior of the desktop. This has always been a pet peeve of mine. Not that I blame the users. But you've seen desktops where again, I'm not going to blame the user, but they're like, well, sure, I put my stuff. Well, I'll just drag it to the desk. Oh, you're talking like cluttered icons. Oh, that's totally me. Absolutely. Yeah. But the thing is I don't blame people for using the desktop to maybe temporarily store their stuff. But for long term use, you should really put it in your documents folder. For many reasons. But what they did is that they introduce now a modification to the desktop where it actually has, they call them stacks, which takes the mess that you've created and kind of neatens it up a bit. Yeah, auto-collect things. So it's not so shocking. And it's just like other than prohibiting people from putting documents on the desktop, which would be user hostile, they kind of help you figure out how to deal with the mess that you just created. So I think that was just a brilliant, I think, little tweak to the OS that'll really help. I agree. I think it'll help everybody, you know, support people and the user because it's like, you know, when I see a desktop with like a hundred documents on it, I'm like, oh, man, this is just. But that's OK, right? There's nothing wrong with that in a general sense. There is something specific for you that you don't prefer that, right? But there's nothing wrong with using your desktop as there's no difference on your system between your desktop folder and your documents folder, right? It can be a place where all your crap lives. It just so happens that your desktop folder displays itself as, you know, a barfing of icons on your desktop, whereas your documents folder, it doesn't display itself that way. But other than that, there's no functional difference between the two. So there's no reason that it's bad to store your documents on your desktop. It's just messy visually. And that is, you know, depending on your pension for organization is either something you can totally live with and it's no big deal or it's awful or somewhere in between. And this sort of addresses that visual representation of it without changing anything. I think it's really smart. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. So what else we got here? So they mentioned, oh, yeah, we talked about voicemails on the map. Yeah. Oh, all the new Safari privacy kind of. We're going to randomize everything so you can't track me. That I thought was nice. I am so happy about this. You know, they did a lot about privacy and part of privacy is making it difficult for sites that you go to to profile you. And that sounds like in the next Safari, that's exactly what they did, is that they, you know, did all this randomization weird weirdness here. So if you come back to a site, they may not know that you were there before, which I am so happy about what they're doing here and they have the right people managing this stuff, like looking at heuristic. I mean, they'll do heuristic measurements of all different kinds of things to make sure that people can't build a profile on you based on, you know, non-cookied behavior, right? It's it's brilliant. And and and there's actually some some Maci Keb listeners that that were Maci Keb listeners before they were Apple employees working on on some of this stuff there. And so it's like, this is awesome. Like we knew you when and it's good people part of the family keeping the the, you know, keeping the dream alive. It's good. It there's so much misuse of our personal identities on the web and seeing Apple constantly beating down this this door. Really, it I'm very, very excited about it. Yeah, it's very, very good. So all right, let's is there one more thing? Well, I don't know. No, I mean, you said misuse. The thing is, I think most people and you know this because backbeat media and all that. I mean, the thing is you want to present. I think everybody wants to present content that's relevant, especially ads to people. So you have this tension between, well, how do I do that without being too creepy? And right now, I think a lot of people acknowledge that it's too creepy. Well, it's creepy because people aren't asking for. You go on Facebook. Yeah. And the thing is now you go on Facebook. And the thing is you go on Facebook and you see an ad for a site that you went to on Amazon. And it's like, well, how did this happen again? Yeah, that's the part that gets me. It's something that I just looked up on one site. All of a sudden, it appears on Facebook and I'm like, OK, how did I think I know how you did that? But it's kind of weird. Yeah. Yeah. No, it should be, you know, again, buy in or, you know. Yeah, ask permission. So then that's the problem is it's, you know, it's not happening that way. And now completely understandably, I think most people would say, no, I will not give you permission because you've abused that that data in the past. Why in the world would I opt into that? Whereas, you know, if if it had been done right, like, hey, would you mind we could make this better for you and for us? Just say yes here and we promise we'll be responsible. But that hasn't happened. So anyway, I like it. I think I think the updates today are good enough. There's nothing like totally revolutionary happening. And that's OK. It's OK to have software that just gets more refined. More reliable, faster. That's a good thing. So I want to I want to move on here and I want to talk about our two sponsors. How's that sound, John? Fantastic. Awesome. So our first sponsor today is Linkedin Talent Solutions at linkedin.com slash MGG, where you can get a $50 credit toward your first job posting. Now think about this, right? There's a lot of people out there that are actively looking for jobs and might sign up with, you know, other employment services. But Linkedin has a step above them. Yes, you can register and say I'm looking for a job on Linkedin. But there's a lot of people, way more people, that go on Linkedin to network every day. They put their information out there. They build a profile for themselves, right? They're talking about opt in. They totally do that. And they might be the right person for the job that you are posting and hiring for. But they're not telling people they're looking for a job. So therefore, you're not going to find them on other job posting sites. You will find them on Linkedin because 70 percent of the US workforce is already on Linkedin. So very, very cool stuff. They definitely have a leg up and they know how to do it. Like think about it. When you get an email from Linkedin, you look at that stuff. It's not I don't see it as spam. It's really great, great stuff. People trust Linkedin and this is the place that you want to post jobs. So visit Linkedin.com slash MGG. And that will get you a $50 credit towards your first job post there. Terms and conditions apply, of course. But check it out. And that's what we're here to do is get you a little bit interested and check it out Linkedin.com slash MGG. That's where you want to go first and save 50 bucks in doing it. So that's that's Linkedin. Our thanks to Linkedin for sponsoring this episode. Moving on. Our second sponsor is Smile at Smile Software.com slash podcast. Here's the interesting thing. Smile has a birthday coming up because next week on June 12th, I believe that's Tuesday. If I'm doing my math right, Smile will celebrate 15 years of making productivity software and providing fast friendly service to their customers. Here's a fun fact that that day is actually the day 13 years ago. So two years younger than Smile that we recorded the first episode of Mac Geek app, it was released the next day on June 13th. But John, you and I recorded that on the 12th. So we share a little bit of history with Smile here, a little bit of synchronicity and I like that. They are our longest running sponsor. So maybe there's more than synchronicity there. PDF Pen 1.0 debuted at Mackerel San Francisco in 2004. So six months later, right? They started the company and then six months later, they ship PDF Pen. They're up to PDF Pen 10. It now includes watermarking, headers and footers, a precision edit tool and more. PDF Pen 10 also adds batch OCR making bulk OCR a snap. And then they added 10.1, which adds Apple script support for the new features, including that batch OCR processing in PDF Pen Pro. So next week, if you visit Smilesoftware.com slash blog, you can join in the fun of their birthday celebration, including a sticker giveaway. So happy birthday, Smile. And thank you for sponsoring Mac Geekab this week. And for many, many weeks over the past, I think it's decade plus. So you guys rock and thank you so much. All right, let's I've got some cool stuff found here, John. How's that sound? I think we do. OK, cool. Yeah, that's right. We both do. So, you know, I like to test out all these mesh networks, right? And we also talk about traveling and having a secure connection when you're traveling. Well, the folks at Ubiquiti who make Amplify, A-M-P-L-I-F-I great mesh system. You know, Ubiquiti has been making mesh systems longer than any of the other players that are that are offering them in that they've been making them for enterprise corporate environments. So they know this stuff, right? They make something now called the Amplify teleport, which is this little this little thing that just plugs into an outlet in your hotel room or, you know, wherever it is you happen to be traveling. And it does two things. It broadcasts a Wi-Fi signal is great. And then you connect it either via Ethernet or via Wi-Fi to the local Wi-Fi. So I got to my hotel, I plugged a stupid thing, and that's not stupid. I plugged the thing in. I don't know why I said that. You just plug it in, right? It's really easy. And and then I connected to it, like to the Wi-Fi network that it it it creates. And it says, OK, I see these, you know, zillion Wi-Fi networks because I'm in downtown San Jose, pick the one for your hotel. I picked the one for my hotel. It shows me the hello page from the hotel. So I hit connect again. Then it says, OK, cool, I got it. I need to reboot now. And so it reboots and it goes through its thing and it connects and it creates a secure tunnel, essentially a VPN back to my house. And from my house, then I can get out and do whatever it is I'm going to do. And and so it it like it creates one network for my hotel room, one Wi-Fi network for my hotel room. All my traffic is encrypted. All my traffic is protected and it just does it. Right. And everything's copacetic. I only have one complaint about this thing is that the network that I connect to is 802 dot 11 G. And speeds have been awful. Like, I mean, not not awful. Like I'm getting is what 11? No. G is 54. He's 54. Yeah. And now when I connect to the Wi-Fi direct in this room, I can get about 40 megabits per second up and down. So it's I mean, it's pretty good for a hotel room, admittedly. When I connect via the teleport, I can get about 12 megabits up, but only five megabits per second down. And my connection at home has a 40 megabit per second upstream. So that should be my limit on this stuff. But it something's happening. And I think it's the 802 dot 11 G connection. That's the only thing I can I can think of unless there's a CPU issue. Right. Like that maybe the CPU is not powerful enough in this thing. But otherwise, I mean, those speeds are totally fine. It's not like it's awful. It's just, you know, it's kind of awful because I. So it's a VPN, a Wi-Fi VPN extender. Yeah, but extender to anywhere in the world. Right. Which is the cool part. Right. Well, as long as you can access your VPN. As long as it connects by my VPN, that's the beauty of it is I don't have to do any of that. I just connect it to the local network, either Wi-Fi or Ethernet. And it does the magic. Yeah, it's pretty cool. But you have to have an amplify mesh system back at your house in order for this to function. Well, it's got to have a server on the other end. Yeah. But it's pretty cool. I'm looking online and the price of the device you talked about, it looks to be about 100 bucks. You need it with another one of the devices. And I see B&H as a kit here for like $229 or something. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. So, you know, I like my truly wireless earbuds. And I'm a big fan of AirPods in most scenarios. In fact, I like in most scenarios that they don't seal because it means I can like walk around in, you know, downtown or whatever. And I can still hear my surroundings. I have my wits about me. I don't know that I'm quite ready to ride my bike with these things. But as we've talked about, but I like the AirPods, where I do not like them and cannot use them. And don't recommend you use them either is on an airplane. Because the only way to hear the AirPods on an airplane is to crank them up to maximum volume because you're getting all this, you know, plane noise that like the the ambient noise, the din, if you will, of an airplane is so loud that it's dangerous for your hearing like you get you get hearing fatigue just sitting on an airplane. And then you're adding to that if you use AirPods. So I've never used AirPods on an airplane. I've always used things like the Pioneer raise or, you know, things that seal either in the ear that seal or over the ear that seal an ear in one of the first true wireless earbud companies just came out with the ear in M2, their second gen product. And this thing's pretty cool, man. It it, you know, it's just two wireless earbuds. They pair with your phone or your iPad via Bluetooth. So I paired them with my phone before I left and that worked fine. I I intentionally waited until I was on the plane to pair with my iPad to, you know, see what that process was going to be like. Was it going to be frustrating or whatever? Not at all. I paired these things. It happened really quickly. And then I got to sit there and watch movies. I watched, you know, the battery in them lasts maybe three, three and a half hours before it was like, yeah, now you got to put me back in the kind of like the AirPods. You put it back in their little case and it charges back up. The case has a battery in it, so it can, you know, give you three or four charges in the case. But it was fantastic. Not having a cord, you know, if I was in the aisle, if somebody needed to get up, I just put my iPad away. I didn't have to like deal with the cord. I could just get up. I had freedom of movement, all that great stuff, which makes a difference on an airplane when you've got, you know, limited space and you freaked out because you're cramped and all that stuff. It really, it really enhanced the experience. It was it was good. So and, you know, with these, unlike their first ones, there's there's no perceptible delay, which, which means that, you know, you can watch a movie and it's fully in sync. And they have this ambient mode where as soon as I, the way it was set up by default, as soon as I paused my music, it actually turned or my movie, either one, it actually turned on the microphones in this thing because they've got microphones so you can do, you know, calling and all that now. But you can hear like it turns months. You can hear what's going on around you. And then you turn on your music again and it shuts off the mics and you're back into your own world. So really easy to hear plane announcements and things like that just by pausing the movie. And it's like, oh yeah, there you go. That's pretty good. I was, I was duly impressed by these things. It took them a long time to get these things out, but, but the weight was worth it. No, these are definitely going to be a part of my travel kit. So, so there you go. Yeah. Good. Oh yeah. You got something there, John? Yeah. I do have something and I don't know where, how I found this. Actually, I think it was because I recently launched Firefox. Okay. Which is a fine browser. Yeah. But here's where you want to go send.firefox.com. Really? What is it? Well, as they say, it's private encrypted file sharing. So if you go to that page and the thing is you don't have to be using Firefox because it's browser based. So I'm going to tell it's, it's pretty close to what we talked about in a few episodes ago where you use your browser. It actually brings up a dialogue saying, Hey, just drag your file here and then it'll upload your file to their server using HTTPS and what it would assume because they say it's private and encrypted. Sure. And then it sits there and then you get a link and you send the link to somebody and they use their browser to download it. But here's the fun part. It's kind of like, like a spy novel here is that once you can set it up so that once someone downloads the file, it deletes itself. Or I think also if you automatically or yes, self destructs are like mission impossible. I mean, it's awesome. So, so it's either. So I think that the criteria they use is if you upload the file, if 24 hours exists, the file will go away or if someone downloads the file, the file will then delete itself. So you can't use the link again. And you say it's encrypted, but obviously it's unencryptable somehow, right? Well, I think what happens so, so you have an encrypted channel. So we talked about encrypted channels and encrypted files. So the thing is, it's encrypted channel, obviously, because you're using HTTPS. Yeah. And then I think the only concern I've seen people have is that I think that they generate the encryption keys. Of course. When the file is stored on their server. Okay. If somebody subpoena is then blah, blah, blah. But that, but what I like is that they put the controls in there for the file to go by, by once the recipient has received it, which to me is just cool. So, hey, and it looks like it's part of their, yeah. So I see send Firefox test pilot. So I think it was something that they just popped up when I ran the latest browser saying, Hey, this is a new thing that we were running in our labs. So, um, check it out. That's pretty good, man. And, uh, and, and it, it looks to meet the criteria and that, you know, all parts of the conversation are encrypted at some point, but I do like, again, the, uh, you know, the expiration feature. I think that's cool because that's, you know, one thing you got to think about sometimes as well. You know, I sent the script to file somebody. It's like, well, would have somebody retrieves it later. The wrong person gets it. Yeah, exactly. So in this case, because they claim to delete it. What's the maximum size file that I can send with this? Um, they say for the most reliable operation, it's best to keep your file under one gigabyte. Holy crap. Oh, that's big. Okay. Okay. So this isn't like, you know, 15 megs or something. I mean, it's, you know, it's, yeah, I mean, that'll stress your connection, I guess, but, um, maybe, I mean, sure. No, but I like their solution because I have, I have a hundred, I have a hundred megabit per second up and down with the ethernet in my hotel room. You know, it's, I'm pretty impressed. Yeah. Oh, I mean, I like it because it's simple. The thing is, it meets the criteria of a lot of people is that, you know, I don't want to deal with certs and keys and passwords and all that. It's just like, you know, and other people have offered browser based, you know, secure browser based things in the past here. It's just, I just saw this and they floated this out and it just looks like a, you know, for quick and dirty sending a file to somebody and making sure that it's, you know, pretty secure. Yeah. Huh. So I like it, man. That's pretty good stuff. Cool. All right. I think this was sent via Twitter. I'll say Twitter somehow. I don't know. It, the listener David told us about the Pantheon portable Apple watch charger, which is a little charging puck, right? An Apple watch charging puck that also is small enough to like fit on or even be your key chain, right? It's smaller than the key fob for most cars. And it's got, it's got a 700 milliamp hour lithium ion battery in there, which will charge the Apple watch an average of twice. So you've got, you know, two charges in there and it's 39 bucks or something. So we'll put a link to this in the show notes, but this looks pretty cool to have if you're traveling or whatever. Like I can see this being really handy for camping trips or, you know, hiking trips or whatever, but, but even just out and about, you know, it's like, oh, a quick little charge. Good to go. You charge while you're eating lunch and you're done. So I think it's pretty cool. So thanks, David. That's a good one. And, and I found this one is, it was a late edition. It was last night at the SJ Mac Indie party that Chuck Soper puts on every year, the night before the keynote at WWDC. And I met this guy who had developed this app. It's available for free. It's called Slip SLIP. We'll put a link in the show notes, of course. Remember the old days, John, not that we could do it, but I think the Palm people could bump their phones together or bump their devices together to share contact information. Remember that we're hearing that about some platform ever. I don't think I ever bumped. I mean, you know, that's getting kind of creepy. Well, that's the thing. It could be a little creepy, but no, that's what this app does. But he like the guy, it's amazing for whatever. It's the first version I've seen. Maybe it's not 1.0, but the way it works is, you know, you launch the app and the first time you launch the app, you configure not only your contact record, but very specifically line by line, what data you would want to share. So you might have way more information. You might have your home phone number and all that stuff in your contact record. You don't want that shared. You just want to share certain things. So you go through and you turn them on or off, whatever you want. And and now you're good to go. And it uses Bluetooth. There's no Wi-Fi required, no nothing. It's all auto configurable. And the other person launches the app and then something magical happens when you get the two phones close to each other. And I tried this with several phones that had the app running on them. Two phones get close to each other and the screens on the two phones that are communicating change to a different color. And it's it's a color that's unique to the when those two phones connect. So you can very easily see are you and me connected or am I connected to somebody else over there? And we were moving, you know, moving phones around and it was like, oh, look, I'm connected to you. Now I'm connected to you or whatever. And once you're connected, then you initiate, you swipe up on your contact record to send your data to the phone that you've paired with. So it's not an automatic send, but it's a very simple just one gesture. Once you see the same color on both screens, like, all right, cool, go. And and then and then that's it. It saves it to your contacts and you're finished. That's it. It's really, really brilliantly done. All secure, of course, and all of that. The only thing the app is missing is an easy, like air-droppable way of sending a link to download that app to someone that doesn't have it, right. But other than that, it works really well and it's really not that difficult to just go to the store and download the app. And then the app is free. Everything's free. The guys said he's just, I don't know, he's retired or something and he wanted to do something cool. And so he did something cool. So there you go. Slip. I like it. Fun. And great for a conference like this, like he should hopefully everybody here will download this app because it made it super easy. I want to thank all of our premium contributors, which, you know, without you folks, we can't do what we do here any week, especially this week. So and you can learn all about premium at MacGeekApp.com, premium. We had a one time contribution of twenty five dollars this week from Rick S. So thank you, Rick. On the monthly plan, we had ten dollar contributions come in from Nick S. Robert D. Elizabeth B. Jim E. Ward J. Greg S. Olga P. Jason A. and Bob P. So thanks to all of you. We had on the monthly plan a fifteen dollar contribution come in from Micah P. So thank you, you rock, you all rock. And on the biannual twenty five dollar every six month plan, Paul D. Peter E. Brent G. And David C. All contributed this week, too. Thank you so much. And I'm actually a couple days behind. So there's there's a few of you that whose payments came in since I left for for San Jose. And it's as I've said before, the current workflows that's all managed from my computer on the at my desk. So I may not see these things, but I mean, I'll see him eventually. I just haven't seen him since I left. Thank you to all of you and make sure that every one of you premium listeners uses our premium at MackeyCab dot com email address that gets prioritized and we'll answer your questions and all of that first and we make sure we answer everything premium, even on crazy weeks when I'm traveling or John's traveling or whatever. So thank you, thank you. Should we do some more quick tips, John? Quickly, quickly. OK, we will go to listener Rick. I'm trying to decide what the best way is for me to do this. I think I'm going to try it from my iPad here. No, maybe. All right. So listener Rick says, I wanted to share a quick iOS tip that solved two problems for me. Problem one, I want to read my iPad in bed, but the screen is too bright in the darkened bedroom, even with auto screen trimming screen dimming and true tone enabled. Is there a one click solution to reduce screen brightness without fiddling with settings? Problem two, I'm getting older and reading small print is increasingly troublesome. Is there a quick way to activate the iOS magnifier? Turns out the accessibility settings on iOS solve both of these problems for me. How? It's all about the home button settings. I have it set now where I can triple click the home button on my device and when a screen and then a screen pops up offering to accessibility shortcuts. There are magnifier and reduce white point shortcuts. When reading in bed, I triple click the home button, tap the reduce white point option in the screen dims by about half. And when I want to return to normal, I do the same and unclick it. He says, I do the same when I need a screen magnifier. The beauty of this approach is I don't have to go into settings each time and make adjustments and then try to remember how to set things back. A triple click and a tap, then a second triple click and a tap brings things back to normal to set this up. And for the record, I this when I said before that I had my iPhone in smart invert mode, I did this exact same thing. But my accessibility settings, I've chosen to have that shortcut, the triple tap of the home button do the smart invert and not these other things. But you do this in settings, general accessibility, then scroll all the way to the bottom to accessibility shortcut. And there you can set which of these things you want. There's, you know, voiceover and zoom and all kinds of different things. So thank you, Rick, for for that. This is it's one of my favorite features of iOS. And you can add it to the what do we call? Is it the lock screen? The something? I don't know. You can create an accessibility shortcut, like for iPhone 10 users that don't have a home button. It can be on that same screen where you have like your the network stuff where you can put it into airplane mode or rotation lock. I forget what that's called. I don't know why it's just I'm drawing a blank. I blame the time change or flying and the not sleeping and all that stuff. But it can it can be there too. And that makes life easy. Good. Anything? Thoughts, Mr. Brun, did I lose you? No. OK, good. Just just pondering. Cool. All of the all of the developments here. So many so many developments in show seven eleven. Let's see if I can do this differently, because the way I just did it was not good reading from my iPad. So that was that was not going to not fly. I think you can make this pretty smooth. No, I can. Especially if I vamp like this while I'm pulling up the thing I'm supposed to read. Right. Right. Yeah, Paul replied to a conversation that we had in show seven eleven about blocking SMS text messages from, you know, spammers. And he says, I'm not sure that this would solve it, but I was reminded during your conversation of a service called Haya, H-Y-A- A Haya dot com and and I and he says it's definitely for blocking Robo calls and he wasn't sure about text messages. It doesn't seem to block text messages anymore. He says it used to. But definitely there for blocking Robo calls and getting, you know, your phone number off of those off of those crazy things. So thank you, Paul, for for that. I don't think I'd ever heard of Haya before. So Haya dot com you can sign up there. Good. Yeah. I got another one. Same thing from well, not the same thing. Same general concept from listener Ken. He says, use NOMO Robo N-O-M-O-R-O-B-O. He says, I use it for my home phone. It's free and it works with many phone carriers. If you hear the phone with just one ring, it means that it was blocked and it was a Robo call. It's not free with iOS. However, he says, but I did buy it on my iPhone and you can set the app to identify the Robo call. It will ring many times. But if you set the app to send it to voicemail, it will not ring at all and it will make a five second voicemail. He says, this app also allows a way to stop spam texts. He says, I haven't tried it yet because I don't get a lot of spam texts, but NOMO Robo that has a spam text blocker in it too. Cool. Thank you, Ken. Great stuff. Yeah, I ran it for a while and it didn't do much in my humble opinion. Yeah. Not much beyond. If the incoming call doesn't show a name, then that means you're not in my contact list. If you're calling me and you're not in my in my contact list, you're most likely somebody I probably don't want to talk to. So I hardly ever answer those calls. And if they leave a voicemail, like I just got one today, it's like, hey, we've been monitoring your credit card and you can get zero percent financing on your debt, blah, blah. And it's like, yeah, right. Yes, see, I answer every phone call if I can. I mean, if I'm podcasting, obviously you've told me about this. Yes. Have a philosophy theory, but you're a more sophisticated business person than I am. Right. My philosophy is every time the phone rings could be a great opportunity and you might as well find out right away. And I have no problem. My favorite thing to say to somebody when I answer the phone and and I realize, oh, OK, not such a good opportunity for me. Perhaps I need to get off this call very quickly. I say I'm not interested, but thanks for your time. And that phrase, thanks for your time, completely changes the power dynamic. No, because think about it. When you say thanks for your time, it makes it very clear that the phone call is over, but you've been polite about it. And so the only way someone can stay on the phone with you is to break that social contract. And and then they are the jerk, right? They're like, oh, no, no, no, we're not done here yet. It's like, no, no, we're finished. I made that clear. I was nice about it, and now I don't have to be nice anymore. But yeah, that thanks for your time thing totally stops them in their tracks and then I get to move on. So it's a 30 second interaction most of the time, and it's like not a big deal. So there you go. OK. And my school of thought is. If something is important, you'll give me the courtesy as a fellow human of leaving a message to express your needs or desires. That's true. Yeah. But then I have to go check my voicemail, right? Because because that like time kills all deals, right? This is a philosophy that I live by because I have far too much personal experience to prove it true. So time kills all deals. So if I if I let a call go and a voicemail comes in, I am going to take probably more than 30 seconds out of my time to go and listen to that voicemail. And then, holy crap, if it really is a good opportunity, now I feel like I should answer the phone. I got to hunt that person down. Way easier just to answer the phone. I'm going to I'm going to hear your spiel either way. I hear you. You know what I mean? Like it's I don't. I don't have any issue. And I don't say this judgmentally. It's just how I'm wired as a human. I don't have any problem with, you know, the confrontational aspect of telling someone, OK, well, we're finished. It's all good, but we're not going to talk anymore. Like no problem. Call me back in six months. No problem. Bye. Like I don't have. That's OK for me. It's not OK for everybody. Like we're all we're all different people and that's totally fine. But the reality is I'm going to spend 30 seconds to 60 seconds evaluating you any way. I might as well do it while we're right here together. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Oh, Greg. Yeah. So, Greg. Oh, man. Yeah, he said. How could you? I we were talking about, you know, a time machine and and local snapshots and all that stuff. And he says, I ran Daisy disc and it found over 90 gigs of local snapshots. He says, I then followed these steps and it worked like a charm. How to delete time machine snapshots on your Mac. And he sent us a link to to an article at Macworld that talks about exactly how to delete these local time machine snapshots. Now, you could use carbon copy cloner to manage this stuff for you. I'm going to tell you right out of the gate. As easy as this is this Macworld article, article carbon copy cloner is way easier and way more robust, but you can do it with TMU till you do and I'm not going to tell you all the commands because it's hard to do terminal commands via audio. But you use the TMU till command and there's a list local snapshots option for that. And then a delete local snapshots option. You have to be a little more specific with how you want to delete them. There's some more data that you need to put in like a date stamp and that sort of thing. But but I'll put this this article up at Glenn Fleischman wrote it. He knows what he's doing and makes it really easy. Yeah, I was just going to say Glenn. Yeah, I remember meeting him at Macworld years. Yeah. Yeah, he's a good guy. So. But he knows what he's doing. But also I'm I'm like, oh my gosh, they're actually still accepting authors at Macworld. Oh, Glenn's been writing the Mac 9 11 column there for ever since Chris Breen left. OK, I just know that them like many other publications have termed their staff quite a bit. Sure. Yeah, it's still on the board there. Oh, yeah. He's a. Yeah. And he's doing all sorts of other other interests. Right. Yeah. Hypography. I've seen him doing a lot with type and all that. He's a. Yeah. Yep. He's a good guy. Thanks. On Facebook, listener Andrew reported how he got caught. So yeah, he and put a link to the whole discussion. Are we going to have to take away his. No, we all get caught all the time. It's, you know, it's it's why we recommend it's why we share the advice to remember to try and avoid it. He says I'm a little miffed. This is how it started. And then he figured out the problem with help from the Mac eCab community there. He says I recently picked up a verbatim external SSD to connect my 2017 MacBook Pro. And he says the product promises 500 megabytes megabytes per second reads 430 megabyte per second writes. So he downloaded the Black Magic Drive Speed Checker, which is an awesome free utility. You can get it from the App Store. And he says it revealed that I was getting 10 percent of what verbatim promised and I was using a USB to USB cable that I got from a U key or something. This is performance is slightly better on write and significantly better on read on their normal just USB a US, you know, USB a cable that goes into the little dongle. He says I ran a bunch of other tests on the verbatim SSD and am I doing something wrong? And it turns out that C is not necessarily three. The cable that he got was a USB C to USB C cable that transmitted USB to data. It did not transmit USB three data. And so are you telling me are you telling me that USB C does not dictate the speed of the underlying transport? That this is what we've always said, right? And I would have assumed I know I'm just I'm just reiterating. No, you're totally right. I would have assumed the same thing he did that that, you know, the minimum USB transmit rate would be a USB three thing over a C cable. Like, why would it not be? Because USB three is new. USB C is new. Why don't they marry each other? Why aren't they married? Right. Well, because they're because they're not married. That's that's the worst. Yeah, I don't know that they were ever married. I don't even think they dated. They like knew each other. But that was it. You know, they're like cousins or something. They're old enough to date. That might be the problem. There you go. Right. Yeah, but no. Yeah, USB C. So the letter describes the shape of the connector. The number describes the protocol, which therefore defines the speed. And that's such an important lesson to remember. It's too easy to get caught thinking that there's some minimum thing because he looked on the box and it was like, oh, right, it's a USB two thing. So he bought a USB three cable and everything was golden. So beware and let us let us use in theory. You could have a USB C cable that does USB one. In theory, yes. Or two or three or I suppose someday they'll come out with four. What do you think? I would assume. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Interesting stuff. Good. That's crazy, though, because, you know, we almost thought that USB C would be your least apple did that is like, well, you know, this is the end of the be all because we're going to make all our, you know, a lot of our future machines, USB C only. And it's like, well, but some of those machines are USB C with you with USB three point oh, some are USB C with USB three point one and Thunderbolt, right? But the shape of the connector on the side of the Mac does not tell you anything about that. It's only informs you of what shape plug will fit in it. That's it. So it's pretty crazy, right? You know, now it's well, it's just confusing. Yes. You would assume the two would. Again, be associated. Yeah. Some level. I they're not. They're not. Well, I'm. I'm waiting for that moment because right now, Dave, with a Mojave, right? Yes. Yeah. Mac OS 10 14. I am fortunate in that my Macbook Pro 2012 is the bottom of the barrel machine that they will support. Right. I saw it in the specification and they said mid 2012 Macbook Pro is the minimum machine that's going to run Mojave. So the thing is I will have to purchase another Macbook Pro at some point. But hey, it's 2012. Yeah, it served me well. Yeah. Yeah. So so a lot of the like Sierra and High Sierra had the same support. The list, right? Nothing changed when we went to High Sierra and you could go back as far as 2009 machines and in many cases. But with Mojave in in a general sense, your machine has to be 2012 or later in order to support Mojave. We put an article up detailing all of this that there are some machines, specifically Mac Pros from 2010 and 2012 that will work with with Mojave. Beasts. Anyways, what's that? From what I recall, they were multi processor beasts. Anyways, correct. Yeah, correct. They need a metal capable graphics card. There's what they're recommending. But but all those 2009 and 2010 machines that previously could run High Sierra and Sierra like High Sierra is the last thing for, you know, like the MacBook like my MacBook Air that's a mid 2011. It's like, yeah, no, that's the end of it. So it's fine. It's all good. That's how it works. It's, you know, how things go. So and then and then listener Bill sends in a tip. And, you know, it's I love that we find these things. He says, I know that modifying the date and time of photos in the photos app on the Mac has been discussed. However, some of your listeners may be interested in some observations I made recently while doing just that. He says, my wife and I were recently on vacation throughout multiple time zones in the US. He said, we each have our own iPhones. And while we occasionally air drop pictures that the other person wanted during the trip, I recently added a number of pictures she took to my library now that we're back home in the Eastern time zone. He says, as an aside, and he's right about this, air dropping is the preferred method to share pictures as you get the full file with air drop, whereas you get a compacted one if you send it through email or iMessage. He says, after copying over the desired pictures with air drop, I couldn't understand why pictures taken at approximately the same date, time, and location weren't showing in chronological order in photos on my Mac. This would drive me nuts if I couldn't find a solution. Looking at the heading of the picture and photos at the top of the screen when the picture was blown up was baffling as the date, time, and location information appeared to be correct. After some digging, I found the culprit, which at least deserves a firm fist shake at Apple. The air dropped pictures had the correct date, time, and location, but the wrong time zone. All the imported pictures had Eastern time, even though they were taken in mountain or Western time zones. I said so or mountain or Pacific. He said, so if a picture was taken at 9 a.m. Mountain time, it showed as 9 a.m. Eastern on my Mac because it was Eastern time when she air dropped it to him. So this is. Yeah, I don't know. So it's not honoring the data in the photo. It's trying to be smart. That's not smart. That's a bug. Yeah, that's true. He should know I'm with you. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that shouldn't happen. No, the thing is, no. Now they think about, no, it's not doing something smart. It's just a bug. It's like, you should not change any of that data. Why are you changing import or strip at all? Right? I mean, if you're going to keep, if you're going to preserve the time and the date by all means preserve the actual time in the date, not a mangled version of it. Yeah. Yeah, fascinating. So yeah, he says the location and information. Yeah, so anyway, there you go. Thank you, Bill. That's I it's a good find. And I agree with you, John. That's that's one that should be. Should be. Reported to the proper authority. Yes, exactly. Can we even do that? Does that they even have that in the menu in photos anymore? No, they don't do they? No, I don't know. No, I remember some Apple programs had a menu saying, hey, you know, if you find a bug, report it to us. But I do not see that in photos. Oh, yeah, that's right. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know, man. It's but it is time. The band's playing and it's it's late for you and, you know, it's talco. Yeah. Well, it's only for you. I think you should check out the San Jose action there. Well, I am. I'll go to a couple of parties tonight. My my cohost on gig gap, Mr. Paul Kent, who is known to many folks who used to attend Macworld Expo years ago. He's also a guitar player and a band leader. And his he lives in this area. So his band is actually playing. Yeah, I learned you're playing with his band, right? I learned that, too, on a Facebook post. I don't know what that's about, to be perfectly honest with you, that this is the most I know about that. I didn't know he booked you. Yeah, same when you were surprised. It's like that. Yeah, and I don't think he replied to that. So there you go. And I think is the the house rockers, right? Mm hmm. Pretty rock and dirt. Great band. Yeah, 10 piece band with a five piece, five of them are horns. And they recently got a new drummer, which we I mean recently in the last six months or so. Which we talked about quite a bit on giggab at giggabpodcast.com. So if you are a working musician or you like live music in any way, I think you'd love that show. So so go check that out. But I'm really eager to check out his new drummer. This guy's comes with a good one. I was mackerel because me being a saxophone player, I appreciated the brass section so much because they had some. I mean, they had like a I think one of the guys had a baritone sax. Oh, yeah. You need some. Yeah, man, those are good pipes to play that thing. Yeah, I got to play with them. I I went and subbed for them. I flew out here a couple of years ago and played a weekend with them where their their former drummer couldn't do it for whatever reason he had something else going on. And so Paul flew me out and I learned all your tunes. And man, those horn, that horn section was a blast to carry and play with like and support really is what it was. But holy crap, like those guys are so tight. Oh, man, really, really fun. So if I do get to play with them tonight, that'd be great. And if I don't, if I only get to watch them, that's also fine. We shall see. I'll let you know what happens. But yeah. All right. What else? Let's see. Where where it where is we here? If you ever want to if you want to rap with me. Yeah, rap with Dave. Or just say something. Anything. The place I would send it to. If you do email, which you should be, but. You want to send an email, Dave, to feedback at Mackeygap.com. That's feedback at Mackeygap.com, my friend. And you are absolutely correct, even though I hear the popo is coming to get you. Is it me that are coming to get her? Is it you? I couldn't tell. I heard it, too. But I don't know who's coming again. Oh, OK. But no, you're correct. It is feedback at Mackeygap.com unless. Unless you're a premium listener. Yeah, unless then it's premium at Mackeygap.com. We did. Yeah, yeah, but that's OK. We can say that one again. And and find us on Facebook at Mackeygap.com slash Facebook. But I will tell you this. There is the plan is that Friday morning, once I'm back in my office, because I fly home Thursday, pull the switch. We are going to pull this. Well, we're not going to pull the switch on Facebook, but we are going to flip the switch on our new community Q&A system that we've been testing and talking about here over at Macobserver.com. That will be at Mackeygap.com slash forums. We'll redirect to that in one way, shape or form. And I promise I'll remember to do that. But it won't be live until Friday, assuming it works, which can't promise. But it probably I mean, the tests have gone very well. So I I'm I'm confident that we'll be able to get this going. So should be fun. I think it's a much better system for Q&A, because you can rate answers and search things. And Facebook is just, you know, sort of a free for all in terms of the groups and organization. There's none. So I think this will this will work really, really well. I'm excited about it. So we'll talk about that certainly next next show. And you might be able to check it out in the in term. Our thanks to cash fly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. And then, of course, all our sponsors, as we mentioned, linkedin.com slash MGG saves you 50 bucks. Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast and slash blog so you can wish them a happy birthday. Otherworld computing at MaxSales.com. Barebone software now going to be on the Mac App Store, as Apple announced today, ring.com slash MGG. Get some good deals there. Very cool, folks. Thank you so much for listening. Go ahead, John. You're a San Jose. I think you made it there. I did. You may have some advice for us, even though you did make it through many challenges. I made it through many challenges, including the battery that I kept in my away suitcase, even though the United Gate agent incorrectly informed me that their policy was to have it removed. If it was it was not checked. Yeah, there was a whole big thing. You can watch my Twitter feed for how away got involved and spanked United. It's crazy. But, you know, the the point of that whole thing was regardless of whether or not I removed the battery, was convincing the gate agent that it was not his concern because the goal, as we said, is don't get caught.