 Greetings, folks! It is time for Mackie Gab. And I'll bring us our quick tip of the week. I've been traveling quite a bit lately. I'm traveling again this week. And when I park my car at the airport, I take a picture of the parking sign that shows me the level and the location on the level. That's part of the tip. But the biggest part is favorite that picture. Because if you're traveling, chances are you're about to go take a bunch of pictures and having to scroll back through and figure out where that one picture is can be a real pain in the neck when you've just gotten off a long flight. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mackie Gab 1030 for Monday, March 25th, Tolkien Reading Day, 2024. Greetings, folks! And welcome to Mackie Gab, the show where you send in quick tips like that. Or we share quick tips like that. You send in questions that we answer. You send in cool stuff found. We share all of that. We string it together into an agenda such that we all have the best odds at learning at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include ZockDoc.com where you can sign up for free and download the app today. Backblaze.com where you can get their fully featured no risk free trial and Manscape.com where coupon code MGG gets you 20% off and free shipping. And if you don't know that I've been using chat GPT to write my ad scripts and make them a little bit interesting and even a little quirky, I think you'll agree that knowing which three sponsors we have today, you're going to want to listen to what chat GPT had me say. We'll talk more about those in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And also here in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. And it could be back in the States. Dave, I've been traveling a little bit lately too. You may know that. I did. I figured that out. My trick is because sometimes I will go months at a time without being at my car that I keep in Memphis. Right? So, you know, where is Het Darn Thing? And I have wandered the parking lot before I came up with this method, which is to, I'll put it in reminders. I'll create a reminder for the date that I'm expected to return and I'll write down where the car is there. So when I land, it comes up, oh, hey, you know, where your car is. And if I'm going to go out to the car that day, fine. If not, I'll move it to the next time I expect to be in Memphis and need my car. So maybe I should take a picture, put it in that reminder. And we've got a hybrid of what it is. Yeah, exactly. And you can, yeah, you can easily. I think you can put a picture in a reminder. I'm pretty sure. You can put notes in your RLs and invitations and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I like that. That's great. Yeah, that's good. Anything I can do not to have to think, especially, and, you know, you do travel frequently, far more than most people. And certainly far more than me, but lately, you know, what we did CES, then I was in, I went somewhere and then I was in Mexico and then I was at South by and then this week at podcast movement, getting off the plane. It's like, often, if it's been months since I've traveled, I will generally remember where I parked. You know, getting off the plane after like, even after just Mexico is like, um, I remember where I parked. Oh, no, we parked there for CES. Yeah. Like, oh yeah, we had that spot for CES. We actually had a great spot for CES. Yeah, that was good. Yeah, it was good. But it's like, but that's what I remember. And it's like, yeah, but I don't have that one now. So another tip for parking at the airport that I will share and this definitely works at Boston Logan. And I only share it because I love you. We don't want to share this with everyone. At Boston Logan, it's a multi-level garage. And there will be signs that say this level is full. This level is full. You got to go park on that level. I like to park on the level where I don't have to put me and my luggage in an elevator to go up or down. But that level is always, there's always a sign that says this level is full. Here's the thing. The person that is the first one to leave the level is not the person who changes that sign. And so the nice part about that sign, it is deterring everyone who's arriving from even thinking about looking on that level. I always just go to that level and invariably find a spot, usually one very close to the door. It's quite fantastic. So I share that tip because I love you all. Please, please don't ruin it for us. Not all that's a one. Yeah. And I'll add the one to that, which is often if you use prepaid parking, we got turned away for the first time ever. We prepaid and we got to the place and they're like, oh, yeah, no, we're full, but go down the street to this address and they'll take care of you. And they're like, yeah, you didn't prepay here and we don't have any spots either because it was spring break or winter break for the schools. And so we wanted to have a backup is, I guess my point. Back up your computers, back up your parking plan. Does nobody use the maps thing? I guess that wouldn't really work for a multi-level garage, but doesn't maps automatically pin? I never use the feature. It's like you get a pin of where you parked. My iPhone does that from time to time. I live in a small town, so I never lose my car. Yeah, I've used that in parking lots where it's a fixed level, ground level kind of thing. I don't know how well it does in a garage because it's relying on GPS. And I don't know how good the GPS is in any given garage. I mean, I'm sure it varies. Hey, that ends it for the travel geek gap, folks. That's right. Thanks for listening. No, Simon has a tip about Max. Is it okay if I share something about computers? We should do that. Great. Simon says, most of us know and love quick look where you press the space bar in the finder, quick look in the finder, where you highlight a file, you press the space bar, and it shows you some quick look at the file. If it's text, it shows you the contents. If it's an image, it shows you the image. And then most of us also know, but this might be a quick tip to some, that you can use the arrow key, arrow keys up and down to move to other files. And it will just move the quick look around to other files, which is great. Four images that you're trying to figure out which one, you quick look one of them. If it's not it, drive yourself around with the arrow keys and it finds it there. And then when you're done, you hit the space bar again, quick look goes away. So all of that was the setup from Simon, but really there's like four quick tips baked in to the setup. Simon says, did you also know that if instead of tapping the space bar, if you press and hold the space bar, it shows you the file, when you let go of the space bar, it goes away. So if you know you just want to truly quick quick, it's like the quick quick look, right? Because instead of it leaving quick look on the screen, if you hold the space bar down, it's only up on the screen for as long as you hold it down and then you release it. And you know, I don't know what the timing is. I'm sure that's somewhere set in the settings, how many milliseconds. But that is one of those tips that instantly became part of my workflow. It's like... Yep. Yep. Perfect. It works the way you would expect it to work. Yeah. Like the timing for me anyway was exactly what I thought it should be. Right. I'm surprised I hadn't stumbled across that one before. But that's what I mean about it being perfect. Yeah. Right? Is that we didn't stumble on it. Like it didn't stick once and we wondered why. Yeah. Just like if you hold it long enough. Yeah. I've been using it all week now. Yeah. Did you know about this, Adam? Not at all. I'm going to try it now. Yeah. No, not right now. Yeah. Yeah. I got you. Yeah. Let's see. Doug brings us our next quick tip. He says, I have set up some shortcuts that... I guess he has two things. He says, I know you recently mentioned Carabiner Elements on the show. He says, I'm a FileMaker developer and in FileMaker Pro, the return and enter key perform severely different functions at times. Consequently, my brain cannot handle the fact that my MacBook does not have an enter key. So, I use Carabiner Elements for one simple thing. I reprogram the right side of the keyboard's command key to be the enter key. My brain is now trained to use that key and it is closer to that on my extended keyboard at the office and it has removed many great frustrations. Yeah. That's something worth... The idea that he mapped only one of his command keys, the one on the right, is interesting because as... the way that I type, when I hit the command key, it is often the left side command key. I do some things where I'm using my keyboard in a different way where the right side command key is actually the one I use. But when I'm typing or whatever, it just happens to be the left one. I hold the command key with the left hand and hit whatever the key is with the right hand. And things like Carabiner Elements can differentiate between the two. I'm saying with the left, likely because that's where X, C and V are. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting as I'm thinking about this. The only place that I use the right command key, believe it or not, is FileMaker. And because it's TravelGeekGab today, I will share that I built years ago, I built a FileMaker database that is my trip packing list. And I have all of each item is in there. I have flags for whether it's for, like, a business trip or a personal trip or if it's something that I would bring one time and then delete later. And then I also have it... I put in the dates of when I'm leaving and when I'm coming back. And I have some items, like, say, underwear that the quantity is dependent on the trip length. And I have others, like my iPhone charger, where it is not. And I have that flag. And so I have it calculate how many of any given thing I need to bring. But it works out great. What I do is... And where this command key tip comes in is I do my search, business trip, personal trip, narrow it down. And then I look at everything that was filtered out from the search first to make sure that I didn't unintentionally with my broad search filter something out. And I click through with the mouse on my right side every item. And if I want to move it into the group that I would pack because I'm looking at the omitted things, I want to omit it from the omitted group and that's command T in FileMaker. And so for that, my left hand on the keyboard is perfect with my right thumb, or the thumb on my left hand, which is on the right side of my left hand. That's how most of us work. You know, I do command T with my thumb and my pinky. And... Yep. Says the guy in the Ghostbusters uniform. Nerd. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yes. I haven't... Hi, my name's Dave and I'm a nerd. Yeah, yeah. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. I love FileMaker for that. Yep. But he does have another tip, but if there's anything on this one... Wait, let's... Do you have something to add on this one, Pete? I was just going to ask if you thought a better touch tool might remit that key as well. It probably would as with Keyboard Maestro. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah, there's... So if you already have one of those other two programs. Correct. Yeah, don't drive yourself. You don't need something new. Yeah. Just go and get... Yeah, use whatever one you have. Yeah. I'll put all three of those in the show notes for everyone to enjoy. And then his second tip is he says, I've set up some shortcuts that I used to start and end Zoom calls. My house is very automated. So it closes the blinds, turns on the proper lighting, including a cool little lamp that I have to indicate to the rest of the house that I'm on a call, like the recording light in a studio. I like this. Open Zoom turns on Stage Manager. Oh, good use for Stage Manager. And finally, he says, I needed to set my screen resolution to a lower value as many of my clients are working on much smaller screens. Ah, so when he shares a screen, they don't get stuck with this 27-inch monitor. I could not find a way to do this natively in shortcuts, but I did find this cool little utility on the Mac App Store called Display Menu that is Apple Scriptable. Ah, I like this. That's good. And he says, adding a short Apple Script to the shortcut solved all my issues, and he just has an Apple Script that says to tell Display Menu to set the screen resolution to what he wanted it set to. That's really interesting. So Display Menu, first of all, I love that you have this shortcut slash automation that configures your computer and your house for Zoom calls. I basically have the same thing here in the podcast studio that I launched like Mac Geekab. It sets the image on the screen behind me, turns on the light, turns off my air purifier, and it does all the things, right? Launches all the apps that I need. I have thought about putting a red light out beside the studio that goes on when I'm in podcasting focus mode. Closed set, do not disturb. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, why not? Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Display Menu. I like. Okay. That's, yeah. Interesting. Anything to add to this before we move on? Nope. Just great tip again. Yeah. Yeah. And, okay. I kind of want to like pause the show and go like experiment with some of this stuff. But I won't. And speaking of Zoom, this dawned on me this week, somebody online was talking about, I think it was Alison Sheridan was talking about the microphone that we mentioned on the show a while back, and that it has a noisy mute switch, and that that's not good for like podcasting or even Zoom calls. And I thought about this, and I've thought about it a lot. If you are using Zoom without headphones, so you are using, you know, you have your speakers in your environment, wherever that is, that's the sound that you're getting from the, your participants on the Zoom call, and then you have your microphone, obviously, that's picking up you. Perhaps it doesn't need to be said, but I'm going to say it. Your microphone also picks up the sound of the people that are coming out of your speakers, albeit at a lower volume. And Zoom has its echo cancellation logic in there that knows to listen for that and adapt itself and adjust so that it's not sending that audio back to folks and having them get an echo. If you need to mute yourself and you use the microphone's mute button, and it is truly muting the microphone, there are some mics where the mute button on the microphone actually tells Zoom to do its software mute. That's different. But most microphones don't have that functionality, that tie-in. So if you mute your microphone, Zoom will eventually think that the sound that's coming out of your speakers is not making it to your microphone and it will lower its threshold for echo cancellation such that when you unmute your microphone, it's going to be flooded with this sound that was always there and people on the call will get echoes. So if you're on a Zoom call and you need to mute yourself, I highly, especially if you're using your speakers, if you're on headphones, it's kind of a different story. But because hopefully your headphones aren't so loud that it's bleeding into your microphone and if they are, please protect your hearing. I use the Zoom mute. Use the software mute inside Zoom and you can get, you know, there's buttons that you can buy if you want to automate that so you have like a button on your desk so you don't have to dig through windows and do it or you can use keyboard shortcuts from any of the things we just mentioned, carabiner elements and, you know, keyboard maestro and all that stuff. So that's my tip. You could also use push to talk, right? On Zoom, you could use push to talk as well, yeah. Which is the space bar when you're in mute, I think, right? Yep, that's right. I think everybody followed it's a space bar so if you're already muted, if you just hold the space bar down, that'll unmute you, let go of the space bar, you're muted again. As long as Zoom is the front-most app. Well, yeah. Yeah. I know a lot of people, especially on audio only Zoom calls, might not have Zoom as the front-most app all the time. Just saying. Yeah. I've been in those meetings too. Same. Yeah. Was it SNL? Which one of them did the, if real life meetings were like Zoom meetings and they're all sitting at the conference table and the one guy sitting there talking and they're like, dude, you're on mute. You're on mute because nothing, no sounds coming out. No sound, yeah. And then all of a sudden the guy disappears and he's like, yeah, sorry, I got booted. He comes back in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just be aware that you are limiting Zoom's ability to do its echo cancellation if you're using the microphones mute. If it's all happening through speakers. Again, headphones sort of changes this calculus or at least I hope it does. Yeah. All right. What else do we have for Quick Tips here? Adam, you want to take us to Bob? Yeah. I got to put a little context on this a while. I can't remember which show it was, but a few shows back we were talking about backing up your family's laptops and remotely. So I mentioned, you know, my daughter's gone off to college and we're doing, you know, how do we do backups when you've got computers in different places or people who don't hook them to the network or don't hook them physically to anything and they're just sitting on the network. And so Bob wrote in, he says, I have a similar problem in that there are mostly MacBook Pro laptops in the family using an older Mac as a backup server with carbon copy cloner running on that server. He says you can pull backups from the MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops in the house. I didn't, this is something I have not played around with the carbon copy cloner, which is great. He says actually it can pull backups from any Mac that is accessible even across the internet via a secure encrypted connection. And if the MacBook Pro is set to wake for network access you can get backups from sleeping Macs. Luckily at night my family Macs are all on their chargers. In my case it's an old Mac with a network mounted Synology drive but it could be just a large backup drive two or three directly attached to the Mac. Carbon copy cloner backup utility on the server Mac has scheduled tasks for each MacBook Pro and at one time there was a task for my mom's iMac 300 miles away. Yes, I had to set up port forwarding on my mom's router and let that make an SSH connection but I was able to specify a high numbered port on the internet facing side that went to the iMac's port 22 which keeps the script kiddies from pounding on port 22. Yeah. So that is a great tip and I might have to play around with that. Yeah, I don't know why I haven't thought of that but I have carbon copy cloner. Yeah, same. I had no idea, I never thought to use it this way and to further thwart the script kiddies you could use a VPN to connect to your mom's network so there isn't just this wide open port on the internet but you could, yes, peep. Thank you, peep me to it. With the best answer which is tail scale. Yeah, sort of. Sharing a tail net with a family member is like it has to be the right family member. Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, there you go. Yeah. Fun. I like it. I love learning stuff. This show is great. I'm glad this show exists because I get to, I feel like most weeks I get to learn the most, so. Right. Yeah. You want to take us to Martin Pete speaking of learning the most. I'm going to do some, yeah, because I learned something kind of the hard way here and so this may be a not so quick tip because I've got questions when we're done. Okay. But Martin writes in, he says, in the latest episode of MGG the show was talking about iCloud Sync which I use across all my devices. One thing I've found is that I want a temporary, if I want a temporary folder on my desktop but not for other devices, I create a folder and name it whatever. Okay, this Mac only. Sure. And then he puts on the extension .nosync.n-o-s-y-n-c and then he hides the extension in folder preferences. That provides a way of not syncing that folder which I find very useful. I hope you find this helpful. Take care and don't get caught. That's brilliant. Okay. I knew and forgot about the .nosync thing so I am ever so thankful for the reminder of that. The idea of hiding the extension on that folder, like going into folder preferences. That could be problematic. Well, or not. Yeah. I kind of like it. Like it cleans up the view and yeah, but you're right. Hey, how come that didn't get synced? You said it that way, dude. Right, because you told me not to. But yeah, .nosync. I like that. Yeah, yeah. Okay. That's good. Couldn't you just put a tag on that instead, right? So you can identify which ones have no sync on it. Oh yeah. And then wouldn't you also give it a color? Yes, it would give it a color. There you go. That was going to be my other thing. It's either a tag or there's the set app which you can change your icon of a folder. Oh, right. I forget the name of that app. You can change your icon of a folder without a third-party app. Right. It happens to make it super easy. Right. Drag it. Drag it what you want it to look like. Boom. Done. Yeah. Yeah. So I went to go try this and got taken down a huge rabbit hole because I went, wait a minute. I logged into iCloud Drive. Okay. And looked at it and I go, that doesn't look like my desktop. I've got not one but two desktops and I've shared you with some screenshots with Dave pre-show. These are like, now it's like iCloud Drive Archive. iCloud Drive Archive 1. I've got all these old desktops with files. I'm like, yeah, that was on my desktop. I completely forgot about it. It's gone. It's not on my desktop now. Dave, I'm sure I'm not the only person who's done this. Do you have any idea what on earth I did to myself? Yeah. That's good for a friend. No. I do have ideas about this. Okay. What Pete's describing is on his Mac, if he goes into his home folder, he sees two folders that say iCloud Drive Archive and a second one called iCloud Drive Archive 1. And in each of these is an archive of some former state of an iCloud Drive on that Mac. And then also in your iCloud Drive, if you go to desktop, you see not just a desktop folder, but you also see desktop Pete's MacBook Pro, desktop Pete's MacBook Pro 21. So when you turn on documents and drive syncing in iCloud, it will ask you sometimes if you just want to merge everything, replace everything. We say on the show often, syncing is hard. Yeah. This is the result of Apple's attempt at... The multiple desktops that you see in the iCloud Drive are the result of Apple's attempt to not cause you to lose any data when you try to essentially merge... Turn on two computers with different desktops for iCloud Drive. Okay. So it's like when I went from my MacBook Pro 21 to my 23. Yeah. Okay. But these, in this case, it's an iCloud Drive desktop and then there's these subfolders that are the former desktops of your other computers. The idea is that you as the user would go through and take the things out of those folders and put them back on your desktop as you wish. And now you just have one desktop that's sort of sank and everything's fine. The archive ones are when you've turned iCloud Drive off on your computer. Okay. It grabs that archives what you had there and then sort of returns you to your home desktop folder and your home documents folders and all of that stuff. So my recommendation then to other folks would be go log into iCloud, go to your iCloud Drive and see if you haven't done this to yourself as well. Go, oh, there's that file. I had no idea it was even missing, but I just assumed tidy. Take a look in iCloud on the web, sure. But also look in your home folder to see if you, on all of your Macs, to see if you have these iCloud Drive archives. That would be kind of the next thing to do. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. I'm just looking in my home folder. Do I see any? Yeah, there they are, archives. Look at that. Yeah. Yeah. Never even noticed those there in the home folder. But I don't spend much time in my home folder. You sent us a screenshot of those. You just didn't realize that they were in your home folder when you sent the screenshot. Yeah, I don't spend much time in the home folder, right? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever run into anything related to this, Adam? Have any thoughts to share? Nope. I mean, you guys covered that pretty well. I mean, I've seen it. Yeah. Yeah. I just didn't even realize it. All right, folks, you know, we're always here with quick tips and things that are important. And today, we're reminding you that while our gadgets are smart, we've got to be smarter. Remember, March 31st isn't just any other day. It's World Backup Day. And in the spirit of not becoming April Fools, we're all about backing up our digital lives with our sponsor, Backblaze. Now, we've been in the trenches, folks, right? We've seen the horror of data loss and the havoc it wreaks. But with Backblaze, it's like having a digital safety net for just $99 a year. This is the kind of peace of mind that makes even a hard drive crash feel like a minor hiccup. Backblaze automatically keeps a copy of everything. 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I was thinking of moving to a mesh system because there are some spots in here that Wi-Fi isn't eight so good. So my question is, should I invest on two unified express units and light eight P-O-E or something like that? I need to have six ethernet cables to use with my TV, Xbox, Huebridge, Harmon Kardon soundbar. I'm coming to your place, man. It sounds like you're wired for sound. Mac mini server and Apple TV for the future. This setup would cost me in Finland around 380 euros, but is it worth it? I could get something like the ASUS RT-AX-1800U for 68 euros and use it with my AX-88U with AI mesh. Do you know, is ASUS AI mesh any good? What benefits do I get with Unify, if any? And does it matter in ASUS setup if the inferior router is first? It would be, question mark. Thank you for a great show, Kelly. I hope I'm pronouncing it right. Isn't that Kale or something like that? It might be Kale. It could be a Swedish name, I think. We're going to Americanize it and butcher it right here. There you go. Yep. Proudly so. So there's actually a lot to dissect here. I haven't spent... I've used the ASUS mesh a little bit. I haven't spent a ton of time with it, but we do have... There are a lot of you out there who use it and love it and have nothing but good things to say about it, which... And it might be the simplest way to go because you're going to have your... You get to use the tech that you've already got, so you don't have to decommission something and buy all new stuff. So that's where I would go. As far as putting the inferior router first, I think your reason for that, and this is based on a follow-up conversation, was based on the number of ports available and needing more ports in one location versus another and that sort of defining where the inferior router goes. You can get a switch, a network switch, an inexpensive network switch to mitigate that and then put the more powerful Wi-Fi access point with its router attached wherever that needs to be. I think you're going to be okay with that in either way. You might want the more powerful router as the first... or the more powerful device as the first thing because it's going to be handling all of your routing and sort of the heavier lifting, and then the other inferior one could be your access point, your satellite, and then just hang a switch off of that so that you can have more Ethernet devices. And that's not unique to ACES. You could do that with any router. There are a lot of people with EROS who hang a switch off of the one or two Ethernet ports on the ERO, depending on which model it is, and give themselves lots of ports on essentially a wireless link, which is really nice because that way... think about this. Let's say your Internet comes in on one side of the house and your TV is on the other side of the house. So you put an ERO or any sort of mesh... wireless mesh access point over there. Hang a switch off of it so that you've got plenty of ports. Now you plug your TV, your Apple TV, your Nvidia Shield... I'm loving the Nvidia Shield. It's really the best Plex client that exists. Your Xbox, whatever you've got into the Ethernet ports. Now they're not competing for Wi-Fi space. They're all just using the Ethernet into the ERO and then the EROS managing the backhaul and it can wind up being a more efficient setup. So that's what I would do. That's the first part I wanted to unpack. There's more I want to dig into here, but I'm going to pause here. Adam, do you have anything to add or Pete? No, I guess I do. I like the idea of... We can get caught up in technology and new great stuff and that sort of thing, but I like this idea of, hey, if you can use what you have and supplement it and do it at a lower cost, why wouldn't you want to try that first? At least try that first, and if it's like a huge failure or you haven't made a huge investment and if it works, great. You've saved a lot of money and so that concept to me is, I think, good all the way around. That's probably one of the reasons why I haven't updated my Intel MacBook Pro because it still works and it does everything I need it to do. So as much as I would like a new M3 MacBook Air or something like that, I don't see spending the money, but try little things, do little tweaks if you can and save some money. I think that's a great thing to do. Makes sense. I will put a link to... a TP-Link switch that I have used. It's the TP-Link TLSG108. It's an 8-port switch. You can get it on Amazon for like 18 bucks with a $3 coupon or something right now. And like that's... If you need less ports than that, fine, but it seems like 8 is always kind of a... the number where you can buy plenty of ports. Your ports per dollar is maximized. You get up to 16, it starts getting a little more expensive and it can... These are unmanaged switches. That means they're not smart, that you don't access them with an IP address. And if you want to do that, then you will pay a little more. But for just what you're talking about, I think an unmanaged switch would work totally fine. And it would save you some money and only add like I said 20 bucks or less to the whole thing. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Yeah. And so for those who were watching that's exactly what I was going to say. I'm like, why would you do two routers? Wouldn't you just want to put a switch and get yourself more ports? Yeah. And there you go. So that's... Yeah, that's a great answer. I love that. While we're here, I do... I have wanted for a month and a half to talk about the Unify Express, which Callie mentioned in the house at times. It is networking for prosumers. And it can also just be for pros. But the flexibility of this stuff and the amount of hardware options that you have with Unify. It's from a company called Ubiquiti. They make enterprise grade stuff. Unify, again, like I said, is there... I'll call it their prosumer line. It is really built for small offices and homes run by geeks. You can... The way you get to manage it, it's super fun. And this... When we first talked about Unify on this show years ago, you had to buy all the separate parts. When we talk about routers right now, really what we're talking about is a router that has an Ethernet switch in it and also has a wireless access point in it. So when we say router in sort of common parlance and even on this show, we mean this combo device. When we first started talking about Unify stuff, they didn't have a combo router that you bought a router. You bought a switch and you bought wireless access points. But that flexibility is what makes it powerful. The software behind it also makes it powerful. Since then, Unify has realized that they do have this market of people who want to at least have their core device be this all-in-one. They came out with a dream machine years ago. It was a little expensive and a little underpowered, in my opinion, for what you were doing. This Unify Express it's $150. It's tiny. It's compact. It's got Wi-Fi in it. It's got your well, it has two Ethernet ports. It has one for the WAN and one for your LAN. You could add a switch to it. It's not an all-in-one. It's a two-in-one. But that's fine. It's just like Eero. Eero has their units have only two Ethernet ports and it works out fine. You can add that switch for $20. $150. You put this there and it can be your router. Right? And you can be done. But then, you can add Unify gear to the system. And that Unify... There's more. Oh, there's so much more. You want outdoor access points. You want indoor access points that are powered by Ethernet. You want all of the things and you want stuff that can go long range. You want stuff that can go short range. There are so many options for all part of the Unify ecosystem, meaning it's all compatible with each other. Oh, and then also with Unify, in addition to the router and the switch and the Wi-Fi access point, you used to need a cloud manager or something. It was something you ran locally. You could run the software on a Mac, I think, or you could run it on yet another box. It was like the management software of those devices. You need a fourth thing. This has that built into it, too. So it really is like, yes, here you go. Here's your all-in-one router that's really kind of four-in-one and do what you need with it, and then you can expand into the Unify universe. So, fun stuff for sure. And it's $150. And it really, really catches fish. $149. There you go. Wow. Yeah. It's like, if you're thinking of moving into something new, there's really, there's two routers that I would use in my house that I know of. I have a feeling there might be something from TP-Link in the Archer realm that would change this for me, too. But as far as I have had hands on and would use in my house as the primary gateway router for my home, it would either be Unify or Synology. That's it. They're like, I'm not saying the others are bad. The others are great. I'm just nerdy, and I want control and granularity. Super granularity to say. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right. The other, like, Eero's router is great. But I, you know, I want to, I've, I ignorance, and this is, ignorance is the wrong word to use, but I'll say it anyway. Ignorance is bliss. Like, if I didn't know how great it was to be able to tinker and mess with everything all the time, then I wouldn't know what I was missing. However, I don't get that better. That's funny. I would I went that route because when I moved out here, I needed coverage. I wanted to go mesh and I just went, I'm just going Orbi Wi-Fi 6. Yep. You know, because that was the thing at the time. It was very expensive, but it was literally I got the kit. I plugged the things in. Done. Yes. And I didn't think about it. I ran the little app. It did the setup, you know, and if I want to get in, I can do, you know, the little stuff that I'd like to do like DHCP, you know, configurations and stuff like that. But, you know, overall, I wanted to set it and forget it. If I was going to do it now, I probably would go with the, the Unify stuff. I think, I think that stuff's great. I had a client that I worked for that put it in in his house, you know, the really high-end stuff. Yeah. Because he was wiring up everything for smart and like building his house and like doing this whole thing. And I helped him with some networking. And I was very impressed by that gear. I didn't know about it at the time. But now, yeah, that's that's high-end good stuff. It's high-end, but you, but it's not getting cheaper, though. Like that, that's a great price. Yeah. It's it really, it is inexpensive now. I mean, it can be inexpensive now. You can make it as expensive as you want to, but you get all the power and the foundation of the platform for 149 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. And as you were describing it, I'm going to age myself. So, you know, I think too, when you're talking about all the separate pieces versus sort of all in one thing, it reminded me of, you know, do you want a component stereo or do you want a bookshelf system? Right. Right. And I I should say that, you know, the dream machine has evolved. It is now called the dream router and it is only 199 bucks. So, you know, you get and now you get a four-port switch with it. Two of those ports provide power over Ethernet, which is great if you're using access points from Unify that need power over Ethernet. Now, you're good to go with that. So, and it's a Wi-Fi 6 access point. So, like the I have not tested the dream router, but that if you were going to if you if we were having this conversation about what you would get at him, I would probably steer you toward the dream router instead of the Unify Express just because you get a little more ports, you get a little more power in the foundation of what you're doing here. So, yeah, no, Unify has they realized that there are people like us. It's probably the best way to say it. And they have built initially when I first talked to them, they're like, are you sure you and your audience would be interested in this? And I'm like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And they were like, well, you're going to need like 14 pieces of hardware and it's going to be, you know, $1,200 worth of stuff. I'm like, yeah, that's fine. Send it to me. I have audience members that are going to buy it and they like that was true. But now they were like, oh, maybe there are people like this and now they've built this stuff that it sort of fits and gets you into the Unify world at a price that you would pay for the Orbi or the Eero or whatever. So, yeah, it's great. And you did say, you know, obviously there are others of which you're not aware of their features entirely yet, but and you did mention ever so briefly, TP-Link showed us some amazing stuff. I know. They're up and coming. Yeah. The Archer line specifically, I believe I am missing something there. And so, you know, I'll fix that. I meant to reach out to them after CES. I guess this is still after CES. I might have mentioned that I've been kind of traveling and the idea of changing my Wi-Fi around just to test something makes my brain hurt with all the travel I've been doing because as you know, when I leave my house, it is not unoccupied and I must have a reliable system in place for the occupants of my home. So, including in the price of the new router is the price of the divorce layer if you screw it up. Right. Yeah. Even when somebody sends me a free router, it might not be free. Yeah. I did just change my internet back from Breeze Line to Phidium because they still couldn't, the block of IPs that they have for New Hampshire is lack-listed all over the internet. I couldn't post on some forums and I think I mentioned on the show. Yeah, so I'm back to Breeze Line. Sorry, back to Phidium. They were very nice about it. Well, Phidium raised my price and I called them about a deal and so for $10 less they gave me twice as much speed which I can't use. Right. Yeah. That's actually a good little tip. You move from a 1 gigabit to a 2 gigabit connection and you can't use 2 gigabits with your setup and you know you're even well, first you would need a router that has at least a 2.5 gigabit port to use for the WAN connection. Some routers have that. Some routers don't. For example the Dream Router from Unify it's a 1 gigabit WAN port as is the Express and I'm just confirming that on this side. And I've got the Synology 2600. The 6600 from Synology has 1 2.5 gig port. You can use it either for the LAN or the WAN but even if you connected that it's like, well, what no one device that you have is going to transmit it more than 1 gigabit because as I mentioned the Synology router has 1 2.5 gig port so your router can talk at 2.5. You could have two Macs doing a gigabit each connected to Ethernet simultaneously over the connection and that's where you would start to use the 2.5 or maybe with Wi-Fi 6e potentially and certainly Wi-Fi 7 you could get into but I don't know like I see that 2.5 gig. You're the 2 gig from from Phidium and I'm like, oh that sounds amazing. It's like, well be nice to be able to use that someday for why exactly. Yeah. So like there are use cases for it but they don't currently play out for most of us. You can only jam so much down that funnel. Yep. Trying to set me up for Cliff? I wasn't but it seems like I did so please take us to Cliff. So the only question I have here, Cliff has a bunch of things including some feedback and a question so we'll start there and we can get into some of the other things that he has feedback and a question but really what we want to get to is he says on the last podcast you were trying to answer a question a listener question about new Wi-Fi routers well we're doing that today too in my humble opinion you should have added a quick discussion of which Wi-Fi standard to get my new setup is 6e to align with my new Apple stuff but if you don't know better you may choose a cheaper option which will not leverage the speed of your devices so opinions guys on you know what standard what should people be buying I know Dave you just mentioned 7 I got Wi-Fi 6 I don't remember if the orbit is 6e or not I don't think it does because it was bought a few years ago so these things change pretty quick and it gets confusing I think which it has what and you know if it's an emerging standard do you buy the emerging thing it's probably not locked in yet you know yeah there's it gets confusing so Wi-Fi 6 uses the still uses only the 5 GHz band and the 2.4 GHz band right it is faster because of the signaling protocol that it uses so it uses it a different way of transmitting the data and therefore it can be faster Wi-Fi 6e uses the same signaling protocols as Wi-Fi 6 however it adds a new 6 GHz band so which is unused by many other things so more radio now higher frequency in with all else being equal the higher the frequency the shorter the range you might have more trouble going through walls with the 6 GHz it's still pretty good with it so 6e is great and when 6e first came out I was like oh this is what you want for your mesh system because we didn't have any Apple devices at the time that had 6e I think I think new phones use 6e and I think some of the new Macs use 6e too but I was more excited because they didn't because it meant the 6 GHz band was unfettered unclouded and your mesh points could talk to each other over that band without your devices clogging it all up over time that is changing of course we knew that would change it you know it's it it would be nice if there was like an agreement to say hey let's only use this for backhaul right but that's not how life works so that's what 6e does is it adds that 6 GHz band it also expands on the signaling protocol a little bit I think lowering some of the latency in the router but I don't know how much that matters I guess it probably use case right Wi-Fi 7 is yet another signaling signaling protocol but the trick to Wi-Fi 7 is that it uses all of the bands simultaneously so whereas with Wi-Fi 6e and earlier you were you know you could use Wi-Fi 6 on 2.4 GHz and sometimes it does it uses that signaling protocol on 2.4 GHz okay great or it'll use it on 5 or with 6e it'll use it on 6 but it's one of those three whereas Wi-Fi 7 has a new signaling protocol and it uses all can use all three bands simultaneously so you have this massive potential massive amount of throughput they say it's almost five times faster than Wi-Fi 6e it's the parallel port of Wi-Fi bingo right no more serial port it's wider band exactly yeah and the nice part about that is we know like we're saying you know the higher the frequency the shorter the range but then also you know there's lots of things that clog up 2.4 GHz so that's longer range but a slower to begin with less bandwidth to begin with and clogged bandwidth which makes it even worse with Wi-Fi 7 the tech is using all of the bands simultaneously and using whatever like maximizing the available throughput without having to jump around and so you do get in theory I haven't tested any Wi-Fi 7 stuff yet it's out various vendors have it it's wicked expensive to use a term that would make Massachusetts residents proud but you know it's there so that's what that is to answer Cliff's question I'd probably lean towards 6E especially for a mesh system just to get that 6 GHz out there if you've got the money or if you don't and you don't care about running up your credit cards then sure go Wi-Fi 7 it is all backwards compatible so your Wi-Fi 6 and 6E devices will happily use your Wi-Fi 7 router and then your router gets to use all of that backhaul so the question I have then does do any of these routers we mentioned before that do you unify the Synology or the Wi-Fi 7 capable no I don't know if Unify has a Wi-Fi 7 option but like I'm pretty sure Eero has their Wi-Fi 7 stuff out the Max 7s so yeah there's the Eero Max 7 that would be certainly a place to start I'm pretty sure Netgears got one too another stupid question so I have my Synology router and I take the Eero Max 7 and I plug it into a switch with an Ethernet and I'm now taking advantage of the Wi-Fi 7 speeds correct that is correct you essentially describe the setup that I have here I'm not using Wi-Fi 7 but I'm using Eero 6E stuff and connected to my Synology with the Wi-Fi turned off I still have issues with Synology's Wi-Fi mesh it's only with one of their devices but it's there so I don't know like what they're it works really well for some people and it works well for me except for one device so I was going to go buy one one pack in bed two starting to get up there but a three pack is $1,700 exactly is that the Eero that you're looking at yes like I said it's wicked expensive I think I'll get a Vision Pro before let me let me take it the other direction too though I want to ask the layman's question which is how much does this matter for most people and if you have an opportunity and less of a budget I don't know if there's still even 6 devices out there but to get 6 or 6E how many people will really benefit from a lot of this stuff it's a great question and yes there are plenty of 6 Wi-Fi 6 devices in fact Wi-Fi Express and DreamRouter are Wi-Fi 6 they're not 6E Unify may have some 6E devices but those aren't it right so the answer is it's not going to make a huge difference for most people as long as the 5 GHz band isn't overly encumbered in your home or wherever it is you are planning on putting this then 6 you probably won't notice a functional difference between 6 and 6E yes your speed tests will if you have the internet bandwidth if you don't have a fiber connection none of this is going to matter like in terms of internet speeds now if you're doing a lot of data transfer locally where you know and you can't use ethernet for whatever reason or ethernets cost prohibitive then 6E might start to make maybe will start to make a difference but it might not even then because you're just expanding that to that new radio frequency range the again as long as that 5 GHz isn't overly encumbered I think you're fine like I don't I think I know in fact I'm thinking in my head I am using 6E here at the house but like when I was using when I was testing and using the Synology Mesh that was 6 like I noticed no difference all of my stuff worked great other than the weird problem I was having with the one access point and so you know I think that the answer is for like a lot of things you know it's the whole perfect is the enemy of good thing right for a lot of people good is good enough and you can maybe save some money and you know but if you're a nerd and you love this stuff and you want the latest and greatest and you want to tinker and mess with it then go for it if you have the money but you know I just always want to point out like a lot of people listen to these shows like this and they think oh I got to have this stuff you know step back we all get excited you know I have a vision pro I haven't worn for a while still trying to figure out what I'm going to do with it but yeah well I injured my right right yeah so I'm going to get back to wearing it but I was looking last night to see like what's what's new yet and it doesn't seem like a lot has changed in the last couple weeks which is worrisome but we'll see I think developers are going to nap out there soon I heard they put out the app store that you can see without having to be on the vision pro to see what's available out there too so I think that's more of a tease for people like me who don't own one to go oh I can go listen to some kind of apps these are I still love it absolutely love it it's absolutely the best device for consuming media hands down in my opinion I absolutely love it but it's again this is all the work experience so yeah but I digress no I agree with you like I and I'm a router nerd I just said I haven't gone out of my way to get any Wi-Fi 7 stuff here you know I'm interested in it from a technology standpoint is this going to make a difference for my life well I also just said that there's no difference for my life between 6 6e and 7 so you know there you go yeah there may be at some point in the future when our band as our bandwidth needs increase and you know things like the vision pro or the quest 3 where you're streaming more and more data to these things at more you know higher resolution stuff wider you know bigger images bigger videos that will be the thing that causes us to need more bandwidth in our homes and that's fine that's like that's a story as old as time like of course we will get there but we're not there today so yeah if you're buying something new right now I would I would start by looking at the 6e stuff just because you want to future proof a little bit and then compare that to the cost of the 6 stuff to your point Adam and decide okay am I there like does it make sense to do this particular future proofing step now or do I do it later those numbers are crazy though wifi 7 up to 46 gigs per second yeah someday we will care about that so I mean I just feel like Tim the toolman Taylor the show from the 90s you know more power more power and I got a laugh because I have a good friend who works for one of the ratings companies and he told me once 25 30 years ago he goes what is going to come to is you're going to be able to pick the movie you want to watch tonight and tell it to download and when you get home from work it will be there ready to go that kind of already happened yeah no no I was saying that was 30 years ago it's what he told me and it's like oh yeah you're going to have to wait all day for the movie to download and you know even with technology today you're going to have to wait 20 minutes for the entire movie to download many gigabytes but you don't have to that's the beauty of streaming all streams yeah so but I just laughed that that was where we were going this Sunday we're going to be able to grab our movie in a day yes online you don't even have to go get the DVD I remember downloading Pirates of the Caribbean to my video iPod and how long that took when they finally put out of the video I was frustrated yesterday trying to put a movie on my iPad from my local Plex server and Plex they're downloading things sometimes it's terrible well it's not the best coded solution and so you have to leave the Plex app open front most and open and I wanted to use my iPad and so I kept switching back and forth and I was frustrated because I wasn't willing to leave my iPad for 10 minutes to download this movie well and then other times I found like I'll tell my iPad yeah download over cellular got unlimited cellular on my company iPad if they get download over cellular it won't do it it just won't do it yep um I don't know where we're going with any you know I do know what we're doing no we're going to listener Adam had a good little tip for us that's in this networking realm so while we're here we'll share this and then there is one question I want to get to I think we're going to save cool stuff found for another episode guys we're going to have to do another episode next week listener Adam says I was listening to the discussion about backups in episode 1026 I was surprised about something that wasn't mentioned while Apple no longer sells their time capsule devices which were easy to set up for network time machine backups most home routers nowadays allow for setting up an attached drive as a time machine destination I have a five terabyte two and a half inch drive plugged into the USB port on my ASUS router and have it shared using the router's own settings as a time machine destination my previous Synology router could do that as well on any Mac you wish to back up just log in to the share save the credentials mount the shared partition and point time machine at the volume and let it do the backup this can work especially well on laptops who can back up over wifi as long as the drive is mounted and you can do that all with an alias or a shortcut I would only do one computer's initial backup at a time just because of bandwidth but there you go this is also if there's a time machine on the house you can likely designate a folder as a time machine backup there depending on the NASA's capabilities given the amount of time since I heard the episode and now you might have been told this already oh yeah we might have been but we haven't mentioned it so thank you for for bringing it up yeah you're totally right many routers not all of them but many will allow you to hang a drive and use use that as time machine and that's value for sure yep alright um how did he get that to us did he send it to feedback at macgeekab.com he did he said I think he sent it feedback at macgeekab.com that's easy for you to say yeah feedback at macgeekab.com folks feedback at macgeekab.com it was funny this week we had I came across two emails one was from a listener that didn't know how to email us and I was just like this is amazing like how much more like we already say it too much it's already become like shtick the worst kind of shtick but you know I get it like it doesn't sink in it doesn't sink in like I get it and then we got another email from a different listener that sent in something and it felt like a non sequitur a bit but they said something about a problem they were having oh with like magnets on their Apple Watch Band or something I'm like wow that's amazing and they wrote us back and said okay look I got to explain that email was actually meant for the accidental tech podcast because they were talking about magnets and watch bands but you guys have drilled feedback at macgeekab.com into my head so much that I sent it to you instead beautiful I love it so but it's like both of these emails came in at the same time like it's like there you go there you go well I've got a geek challenge for someone to send a feedback at macgeekab.com and maybe you guys can answer this or not when I say s lady turn off the living room lamp I get this little google thing that says you need a google app is missing can't do it and then I turn around and the very next thing I say is s lady turn the living room lamp off it works I don't know why I've seen that I don't know why it's rare for me I don't see it as often as you do now Adam you want to take us to one question from listener Jim absolutely this is a great one to talk about so Jim says just picked up a new MacBook Air M3 hey I'm a little bit jealous and once again at least the eternal questions antivirus on Apple needed it all if so do you guys use great show I listened during my weekly workouts and you guys make the time pass quickly we're glad to hear that and I get smarter at the same time yep and Pete same don't let those fling wing guys get you they're just jealous Pete can you explain what fling wing is for uninitiated that's a helicopter which the definition of a helicopter is a million parts rotating about an oil lake waiting for metal fatigue to set in so this checks out as far as Jim's I know we all have opinions on this I I don't believe that virus protection software is necessary on the Mac however I run it anyway in that anything in real time because I don't want it to slow down my Mac but I do run malware bytes on each of my Macs once per week in a semi-automated fashion malware bytes has a way to automate this but it comes hand in hand with their always running in the background scanner and I don't want that so I have keyboard maestro set a macro that runs once a week that launches malware bytes on every one of my Macs and when I come to my Mac and I see that malware bytes has launched that for me is enough of a reminder to hit start scan and then it scans and I've never had it find the only thing I've ever had it find is an old Word document that had a Word macro virus in it but other than that I haven't had it find anything but I'm happy to know that it runs once a week so I guess maybe I do think you need it but I don't know in a limited sense don't you want it running in the background? Oh I don't want something slowing down my computer this is definitely a holdover from the days of slow CPUs and spindle drives aka slow drives where it and supporting windows machines which absolutely at the time anyway I don't really know how it is now needed virus protection software but virus protection software the whole idea is it sits in the middle of everything you're doing the file that's accessed is scanned first before your system gets to see it everything you do is being you know filtered essentially and that by definition causes some level of latency in what you're doing whether that latency now is something I would notice or not given how fast technology and how much it how fast it is and how much it's improved I don't know that's my reason for it and I don't think viruses on the Mac are bad enough that I need to potentially give up performance for protection those great Apple that campaign too for a while you're coming to a sad realization prevent or allow prevent or allow how about you Adam what do you I'm same you know I run run malware bytes occasionally that's for sure the other things that I do and I don't know if I'm unusual or not but I have Apple's firewall turned on I always have so I notified if things are coming in or out there's other tools you can do you can get to run this and you know to do things like that I also don't I run with gatekeeper on like I don't disable gatekeeper I don't do like the sip thing that people do where they turn off security protection I think it depends on sort of how you operate your Mac you know if you're one of these really techie geek people that you know you want to be able to download anything from anywhere on the internet and then install it and you've turned all that stuff off then you might need that stuff more to be honest you know I also just practice safe computing and I drill that into my friends and family and and like as a matter of fact even my mom knows this so much she's on an iPad and she just called me this week because she got the pop-up and it was like you have a virus on your computer and you need to call this number and it immediately calls me it's just like but for her it was more like how do I stop this thing from going because it was actually playing audio like which I hadn't even heard before yeah it was super annoying and it was very hard over the phone to talk her through how to close a safari window it's like but you know it's my mom do you see that you see that little blue button with the tabs like it looks like two squares no I don't see that it's at the very top you know but finally got her to it and showed her how to close the tabs and and uh she was fine but you know like I I don't you know I don't like try to download illegal move I buy my movies and content you know from Apple or I watch streaming or like you know it depends on a lot of what you're doing you know like if you do if you're going to dark places on the internet yeah you might need it a little bit more yeah but uh yeah yeah you bring up your especially your mom's anecdote there brings up an interesting thing and that is one thing I do check on the regular is in safari's preferences extensions I go in there and I make sure that I know every extension that's listed because it's really easy relatively easy to wind up installing an extension that will do nefarious things and not even know about it so there's that one and then there's also the if you go to safari preferences websites notifications look there too because that's super easy to allow a website to give you notifications in notification center and we've talked about it on the show fairly recently there can be conware notifications that look like they're coming from system preferences say you have a virus you click the notification it brings you to a nefarious website and walks you down that path so check those two things I you know I check them I wind up checking them regularly enough as I think about it like right now or when an email comes in from one of you or something like that but in your list check once a quarter extensions and notifications in safari because those are pretty they're easy or attack vectors for folks and another one have to mention clean my mac has malware removal and it comes free with set up well comes with set up yes right it comes with set up yeah yeah Pete Pete and I were thinking the same thing yeah I was going to say that I was also wondering if malware or if clean my mac x had a had a thing for extensions it probably does it probably does yeah we should dig into that yeah yeah yeah yep yep yeah alright well we've we've extended our welcome here and if my new mixer setup works oh it does so I did I use sound desk again today to mix the show here from the studio it's the same software that I used while I was on the road last week I've learned a lot more about it I I think the reason I think there were two reasons that my CPU on my laptop was uh flaking out porthos John pointed out something that we talked about when I was in Vegas Pete but when we were in Vegas but I forgot about now it's in the pre-flight script and that is low power mode on the mac laptops will cause things like chrome to really crater and so uh that especially video in chrome that sort of thing um that was part of it and then the other part of it was I didn't realize that sound desk had its own plugins inside it that are all running at zero latency and very low CPU usage and so I've learned a lot because I played with it and recorded like six podcasts with it since this is amazing it's it's a great piece of software for 40 bucks so but I'm curious I know we are using a completely different gain structure for this episode so if you've listened this far and you have thoughts about did we sound the same did we sound different is it better is it worse thoughts send us feedback at macgeekab.com thank you folks for listening thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you thanks to our sponsors you can learn about our sponsors at macgeekab.com thanks to our sponsors of course coupon code MGG at manscape.com gets you 20% off and free shipping backblaze.com MGG gets a fully featured no risk free trial and Zock.com MGG is where you go and sign up for free I don't have anything else to add for me? I don't know anybody sure don't get caught thanks for hanging out everybody see ya later