 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Hub episode 740, that's 740 to you and me, for Monday, December 17th, 2018. Welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Hub, the show that we put together every week. We take your questions. We take your tips. We take your cool stuff found. We even take your rants sometimes. We mix it all together into something that hopefully approximates a flowing agenda. And we deliver it with the goal being that every single one of us, you, me, him, her, all of us, we each learn at least five new things. Every single time we get together, sponsors for this episode include Ops Genie. Now from Atlassian at OpsGenie.com, JamfNOW at J-A-M-F dot com slash M-G-G, and CashFly, and their new web content optimization solution at mac.cashfly.com. We'll talk more about each of them a little bit later. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? You know, I'm doing okay, Dave, but one of my machines here is not doing too well. Well, I don't know what's going on here. So I was noticing that on my MacBook Pro here, I have a one terabyte SSD, and I was noticing that the amount of free space on it is getting into the tens of gigabytes, which makes me unhappy. So I was like, well, you know what's going on here? I go to, you know, you can go to about this Mac. There's a storage tab and it shows the various categories of things that are, you know, shows, you know, parallel VMs, you know, a few hundred gigs, which is, yeah, okay, sure. Photos, 100 and something, which is right. But then the system portion, Dave, on this machine, it's shown as 421 gigabytes. What? That's crazy. That ain't right. No, that ain't right. I'm with you on this. So I'm trying to figure out what the system is holding on to. And the thing is, I deleted some things that I decided I didn't need that were on the order of gigabytes of size, and the free space would not go down. So I've seen that before, where the free space doesn't necessarily go away right away. There's some, like, but if I go to the terminal and I type df space dash h, all in lowercase, df is disk free. The dash h means show it to me in human readable form. I will see it change there. So. Okay. I'll look at that. But I also have a couple of pointers to some, you know, features that we offer on this show that you should all take advantage of if you'd like to. So one is our chat room. And I think that's at macigab.com slash stream. That's correct. And our good friend Brian Monroe says the system part may be your local time machine snapshots. And I've been exploring that is that that's what's happening here. I didn't think snapshots would hog so much space. And I looked at a list of mine and I don't have a lot of them. I think I have like 11. So I can't think that all of them would be taken up the space. I'm thinking I'm suffering from the, oh, your drive was converted from HFS to APFS. And there was a problem with that. And you're now suffering. So I'll have to ponder how to deal with that. And one thing I may do, Dave, may surprise you, but, um, you know, I hear we have these forms. You know, I may post the details of my woes here. And we're, I think the forms are make macigab.com slash forms. Is that correct? Yeah. Macigab.com slash forums. Yes. That's right. Yeah. Wow. And there's just a thriving active community there. Yeah. So I may post the details and see if somebody can help me out. So I'm curious. I may just restore from a backup because I multiple backup. So I have a CCC backup and I have a time machine backup. I'm curious why you think it's not time machine snapshots though. I think Brian's right on this. Like that, that's what shows up there. Yeah. Well, the thing is I used and, um, there's a command where you can look at number snapshots. Oh yeah. Yeah. I only have like 11. And when I view them and from what I can tell, a carbon copy cloner will let you view your snapshots, both your time machine and your carbon copy cloner snapshots. And from what it tells me the size of them isn't, isn't monstrously huge. So I don't know. I could try to wax some snapshots. There is a way to do that manually. Does sutile or TMutile? There's one terminal command where you can, uh, no, I think it's TMutile. So TMutile has a snapshot subcategory or command structure where you can say, okay, show them to me, get rid of them. Well, one way to, one way to do it is, um, and Brian Monroe just shared a knowledge-based article about it that talks about this, but in it Apple says if you want to delete local snapshots manually, just turn off time machine and give it a few minutes to automatically delete them. When you turn time machine back on it remembers your previous backup disks. So there you go. You know, we had a question about that and I'm not sure if that article is describing APFS snapshots or local snapshots under H-P-F-HFS plus. Well it's discussing time machine snapshots. Yes. No, I get that. It's either. Right. So you know what I'm going to do right now? Yeah. Since you suggested it, I'll turn off time machine and let's see what happens. Yeah, yeah. Just magically free it all up. Wouldn't that be nice? Are you doing this on the machine that's recording and that you're using for? Of course not. No, no. It's on the MacBook Pro. Oh, okay. All right. All right. Sweet. Good. Cool. Sweet. So anyways, that's how I'm doing. Cool. That's my latest technical challenge. No. That keeps it fun, man. That's why we're doing this. How could they let us know, Dave? You know, we're just going to cover this all. Feedback at MackieGab.com. And I will concur for this one time with my esteemed colleague here is that it's feedback at MackieGab.com. Feedback at MackieGab.com is the right place to go if you want to send in your thoughts and tips and questions and any of that. Jamf, however, is the right place to go if you want to manage all of your iOS and Mac OS devices, all your Apple devices. Because our first sponsor Jamf now allows you to set up an account for free that lets you manage up to three devices at a time for free. And that's at jamf.com slash mgg. Additional devices are just $2 start at just $2 a month per device. And it's really cool because, you know, it's easy to keep track of your own Mac and know how much free space you have on your own Mac because you're using it every day, right? But what happens when you have other devices that you manage for your employees, for your customers, your clients, even family members, right? You wouldn't necessarily know that the thing was running out of space until you get that phone call that says, Hey, I'm out of space. Then it's an emergency, right? Jamf now lets you manage all this stuff, see all this stuff, control it all. You can protect all your devices. You can check to see what's out there. You can distribute Wi-Fi and email settings. You can deploy apps. You can enforce passcodes. You can protect your company data. You can even lock or wipe the devices needed from anywhere. Jamf now lets you do it all with no IT experience needed. So as I said, start securing your business today by managing your first three devices for free. And it's up to three. So if you take one off, then there's an open slot. Three slots are free. More than after that, it starts at just $2 a month per device. Go create your free account today at jamf.com slash mgg. Jamf.com slash mgg are thanks to Jamf for sponsoring this episode. And with that, John, I've got some quick tips for us. Trick is going to lead us down this path. It says, I discovered a neat trick today that I've never heard of before. It has to do with the trash. If you select a file in the trash, like opening up the trash and select the file and hit command delete, Finder will remove the file from the trash and put it back where it originally came from. Try it and see if it works. So I tried it, John. And for some reason it didn't work. I got a beep every time I tried it. Even if I deleted a file right away, it would still be, but once I had something in the trash highlighted, I went to the Finder menu, the Finder's file menu, I should say. And in looking there, I see that there is an option. It was for me, it was grayed out for whatever reason. And the option is put back. And next to it, what's there? Command delete. And so it's there. But for whatever reason on my Mac when I was trying this before, it wouldn't work. But if it does work for you, then that's great. I'd love to figure out why it wasn't working for me. But, you know, there you go. What do you think, Mr. Braun? Yeah, pretty good, right? No, I was going to mention that part. Because yeah, when you have the trash open, that will show up in the file menu. It won't, if the trash isn't open, if you're just in the regular Finder. Well, yeah, command, the command actually changes, right? Because if you go to the file menu, it's move to trash is what is there. And then once it's in the trash, it's put back. So the command actually changes depending on which window you're in. Yeah. And it may have some UI or UX people shaking their fists because. Yeah, it kind of makes sense, though. I mean, it's, you know, well, kind of like contextual menus, they change. Yeah, they change. So they're making it contextual. It's like, why put that there if you can't use it. Yeah, on this machine, too, I can't get it to do it. I don't know. I don't know what it is. Yeah, I am anyway. So there you go. That's what I got, but thank you, Rick. That's great. So Jason will bring us to the next one. And Jason says, I take a ton of screenshots every day for my job that need to be immediately shared with my team over Slack. Ever since upgrading to Mojave on my work machine, I've been infuriated by the lag of the new screenshot system that shows you a preview of the image in a pop-up window forcing you to click on the desktop and hit escape before it will show up on the desktop as a file. I have finally found a solution. He says, please share this in the quick tips so that others may not have to experience the sorrow I had to go through to turn off. And what he found was actually an article at Tech Review, which of course is run by Jim Tannis or as we like to call him MGG Jim. He's been helping out with us here at Mackie Cab for years and years and years, in fact, but and I'll put a link to that, of course. He says to turn off Mojave screenshot previews from a Mac running Mojave. Use the keyboard shortcut command shift five to open the new screenshot utility from the toolbar of icons at the bottom of the screen, select options. Click once to uncheck show floating thumbnail, close the screenshot utility interface and take a new screenshot. This time, your screenshot image file will be immediately saved to the location you designated and you won't see the preview thumbnail again. With Mojave screenshot preview thumbnails disabled, you can still edit screenshots after the fact if needed, just select the file on the finder, hit spacebar to open QuickLook and click the icon in the QuickLook toolbar that looks like a circled pencil tip, which is of course the markup icon. So thank you for sharing that. And this certainly does make your life better. But Jason, I think I'm going to make your life even better because I have to share screenshots in Slack all day long and my workflow hasn't changed since I launched Mojave because while Mojave adds functionality with command shift five, it does not take away any prior functionality with command shift three or command shift four. So what I do is I use the old functionality, but I add one more thing and I can't for the life of me remember because my hands just know how to do it, but I think it's command control. Yeah, command control shift four or command control shift three directs the resulting screenshot to be put on the clipboard. And then you can just paste it right into Slack. I do this all the time. So I will do command control shift four. That brings up the little target thing. I can float over a window. I can hit the spacebar and do just that window, which is super handy as well. And then when it's done, it's sitting on my clipboard. I go to Slack, I paste. I don't even have to deal with cleaning up my desktop because the screenshots never get saved as files. So that's another way to do it is just use the old functionality. Don't worry about Mojaves. And then you can leave Mojave's screenshot thumbnail thing there for when you want to do command shift five and have some more interaction on that. So that's how I that's how I've learned to live with the whole Mojave thing with screenshots. How about you, Mr. Braun? And I'm OK with the way it is. Yeah, I mean, if you're if you're looking for optimum throughput, then I agree that the preview where if you do something, it'll then open it up and then it's like, no, no, I don't do that. Hey, I don't want that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good, pretty good stuff. I like I actually like all my screenshot functionality. It keeps life good. All right, moving on to Keith. Keith writes, he says, I don't know if this is new or not, but I've just found something that I think is pretty cool. That, my friend, is the best description of quick tips that I've ever heard, because that's exactly why we have this segment. Says in iOS photos, if you open a picture you've previously edited. Now, this is iOS photos. Open a picture you've previously edited. You can easily see the original by tapping edit, then simply tapping again on the picture at this point in edit mode. It toggles between the original picture and the edited version. So there you go. That's the tip. I had no idea you could do that. I don't know that I ever even stumbled onto that. So that's pretty good. Thanks, Keith. Good stuff. What do you think, Mr. Braun, anything on that? I don't edit photos because all the photos that I take are perfect. That's awesome. I'll have to crop them sometimes, but. Yeah, yeah, I'm just good stuff. I like it. No, it's good. It's fun. All right, it's another one of those things, man. So listen to Dave. He says he sent us a tip and the tip is how to use the finder to convert a video track to an audio track directly. And the trick is you just right click on the video and then choose encode selected video files. And he's right, except that option might not show up for you. And so the trick is going to system preferences, go to keyboard, click on shortcuts and go to services. And in here, you will see a long list of things that you can check and one of those things is this encode. There's actually two of them. You can choose encode as selected video files and also encode selected audio files. But there's a ton of other things out here. And it's totally worth going through this list to see if there's something that perhaps you might want to use. Apple can put things in here, obviously, with the operating system. But your third party apps can also populate this list so you can trigger things from your favorite apps if they support them. And, you know, and it just shows up there. So such a I always forget about this stuff. There's a ton of them for BB Edit and OpenPGP from third party stuff. And yeah, it's good. Drive Genius Secure Erase shows up there on this uninstall with CleanMyMac 10 like just so many different things. And I forget that they're there. So you mentioned contextual menus, John. And, you know, here's here's yet another use form. So pretty good. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good. I like this is what I like. I like these kinds of tips. I like them. Any thoughts on this, John, before we move on to what I think is the last quick tip for the day? No, no, I should look into it. Well, I do frequently because a lot of the best you pointed out, I think, you know, a lot of apps. Yeah, but things in services and often when you click on the right type of file, like a graphic file, anything that's a graphic program will throw up the services that it offers. So exactly. Yeah, I'll do that. Like, you know, with graphic converter, I'll use it to launch a slideshow. I'll click on a folder and say, well, do a slideshow. And it's like, sure. Right. Right. Yes. See, I always forget about that. Yeah, man. That's good. The tips just keep flowing. All right. One last one. This one comes from our previously mentioned forums where Goggle picks, I think is the name of this user says, are you aware of an old Mac applications repository? I have a DVD CD, CD duplicate slash duplicator slash printer from 2005 sold by disc makers that they no longer support. My boot drive in my G five died and my backup was corrupt. I'm hoping to find a version of describe robotics version for a five point three. Do you have any idea where to find it? And I don't know if that particular piece of software is there. But Brian and Rowe, who you mentioned in the chat room is also, of course, in the forums. And he found the site called Macintosh repository dot org. And this site is for exactly this all this old software that's just not around, not available, not supported anymore. These people have all this stuff as they call it a platinum sanctuary for old software of the classic Mac OS era. So there you go. Tons and tons of stuff, little cool little tip that I like. It's good, right, John? OK, it's like it's it's like that endless room and Raiders of Lost Ark at the end. It is like the endless room. That's right here. Yes, that's right. All right, I want to talk about our second sponsor, which is Ops Genie now from Atlassian. You know, I say it all the time, but things happen, right? Incidents are inevitable that the whole point of this show, the whole reason we exist is because we all have problems with our computers. It's just how it goes. Yes, they save us time, but they aren't perfect, right? And so what it comes down to is when your company has an incident, it matters how you respond, right? When something goes wrong, you would need to make sure the right people know immediately that there's a problem and that someone is working on it, right? Or if someone's not, you need to know that too. And then you check in and you start working on it. This is what Ops Genie now by Atlassian does, right? Because it makes sure that everyone that needs them gets alerts immediately as soon as an incident occurs. It gives your team the power to respond quickly and efficiently, right? To these unplanned issues. And it makes sure that it notifies the right people through a smart combination of scheduling and escalation paths that take into account things like time zones. So if you're the main point of contact, but the expectation is that you would be asleep or otherwise unavailable. Well, sure, let you know just in case you happen to be around. But also then start cascading down the chain and make sure the right people that can work on it right away are informed. And this is what it does. It knows about things, like I said, like time zones and holidays and weekends and all that stuff. And because it's part of Atlassian now, it has deep flexibility with all sorts of things, including lots of them from Atlassian, of course. But Atlassian is an open company, so they support all sorts of stuff. So integrations, integrations include things like JIRA, Amazon CloudWatch, Datadog, New Relic and more. And of course, OpsGenie tracks all your activity and provides real insight that you can look at when things are solved to help make you better equipped for future incidents. It's awesome. We've tried this here. We've used it. We use it, I should say. And it really does. Like we've got, you know, an offshore team in Russia. And then, you know, I'm here on the East Coast and Adams on the West Coast. And it we had a problem and it started alerting people. And it's just like it did everything it said it was going to do. And it worked and we got the problem solved. The best part was it all happened while I was asleep. I woke up, I saw the notifications and I saw the all good. So that was good. So check it out with OpsGenie, your next incident doesn't stand a chance. Visit OpsGenie.com to sign up, get a free company account that you can have up to five team members on. That's OpsGenie.com. It's totally a free account, no credit card required or anything. Just go sign up at OpsGenie.com and you'll never miss a critical alert again. Our thanks to OpsGenie and Atlassian for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, Listener Joe has a bit of a rant for us here. And and then I have something to share about his rant, John. Shall I? Good. Go. OK. Joe says he says I've started my migration away from about a dozen Amazon echoes and I've been playing with my home pod now for about three weeks. Most everything is great and superior to the echo. He says I like the music. I like the automation. In fact, one thing I've never heard anyone mention is that the home pod is superior to echo for automation in that it never loses a connection to a device unlike his Alexa. Sorry, a lady almost doing it daily. Says in voice commands are practically instantaneous versus the lady taking five to 20 seconds. But the issue is that the personal request feature on the home pod is lame. He says one of the main things we use the echo for was adding things to grocery and shopping lists. That functionality in a home pod is highly restrictive. As long as I'm home and the iOS that set the home pod up, it's great and it's easy to set up and use. But once my iOS device is gone, the feature is useless. Echoes are not tied to any specific device other than themselves and your Wi-Fi home pod is tied to your Wi-Fi and the iOS device that is used to set it up worse. He says it only works if that iOS device is present and on the same Wi-Fi network that you set up the home pod on. It's a pain if you try routers all the time. He says so for the nine to 10 hours a day I'm at work. My wife can't use the personal request feature like add X to the shopping list. Dumb implementation, Joe says. I tried reconnecting the home pod to my wife's iPhone only to be told she couldn't connect via the home app because she was not the owner of that app set up. I mean, it's like Apple had to think about how to make this lame for this feature. Says I realized that they're likely justification of security and privacy. But I say Balderdash Apple was just lazy or have lost their mojo. Well, he continues. It seems to me that HomePod could be tied to Apple TV and they're both tied to the same physical location and Wi-Fi or the more obvious answer. Let anyone you have let into your family sharing be able to interact with personal requests. So if you trust them with your credit card, you should be OK. Trusting them by reading an I message by mistake. And some people might disagree. He says, OK, so he says I did send a feedback request to Apple about this. So what he highlights here, though, whether you agree with them or disagree with them, what he highlights here is the fundamental difference between HomePod and and Siri and every other voice assistant platform or at least, you know, Amazon's platform and Google's assistant platform because Alexa. Sorry. I'm sorry to everybody. The A lady and the G lady don't talk directly to your devices, right? They talk to the online services that then talk down to your devices. So that's why there's a little bit of lag there, because that has to leave your network and come back to your network. Homekit talks directly to your devices. And so that happens, as he said, almost instantaneously. But that also explains why your grocery list can be manipulated independently by the A lady or the G lady, because they're just talking to a service. It doesn't matter what other devices are in the house. It's just linked to that service, whatever you happen to use. You could use Amazon's list service or we use our groceries at home. But it doesn't matter, right? It's just all that. And it is sort of a process. I don't want to say it's a pain. But when you get a new smart home device or something, you have to launch the Alexa, the A lady app and and then, you know, go through and find the skill and add the skill and log in to the account. And really what it's doing is no different than you launching, like, say, for your, you know, if you've got a TP link switch, right? I've got one of these. I can launch the TP link Casa app, KSA and, you know, tap the button in the app to turn the switch on and off. It goes via TP link servers. It turns off the switch, turns on the switch. When I asked the A lady to turn on that switch by name, it does the same thing. It talks to TP link servers, which then tell the switch what's what's going on. So that's why that's why that's the fundamental difference. And your entire rant is really based on the experiential impact of that difference. But that's just how it is. It also is the reason that a one of the reasons it's not the only reason, but it's one of the reasons that A lady and G lady are able to interface with so many things because all people need to do is open up an API and say, yeah, sure. Come on in. It doesn't matter. You know, you're good to go. And I over trivialize that that's the opening up an API isn't necessarily the simplest thing in the world, but chances are app developers have already done it so that their apps can do it. It's just like, all right, let's figure out a way to let the A lady interface in. And then it's good to go. So that is the difference. Yeah, but but yeah, it's frustrating kind of living in both worlds because in one sense, A lady and G lady are so flexible. But, you know, there's there's benefits to the other side of this, too. Thoughts on this, John, before I before we jump to the next topic, which really isn't the next topic, but, you know, anyway, I'm pretty much on the A lady bandwagon exclusively and. But I will notice as you point out, so with flexibility comes a potential lack in performance. And every now and then, like, well, you've seen this, you've been at my place. So I have a week to hub and I have some bulbs in the room that you usually or we hang out in and you sleep in. Yeah. And sometimes when I tell a lady to do something with the lights, it may take it's never taken like eons, but sometimes a second or two or like one comes on and the other doesn't. And then eventually it does. And that's because network licensee would be both because it's in the cloud, but then also the wink services in the cloud as well. So it kind of has to do with a double cloud dip. Yeah, that's right. And if any of those are experiencing issues, then, yeah. Things things are not going to be instantaneous. Now, now, not everything is like this. Like the hue bulbs have their own hub and the hue app can either talk via the cloud to the hub. If you enable that and you don't have to, or it can just talk directly to the hub. And with that, of course, you know, you hue also works with directly with HomeKit and you get that same direct interaction. So it's not an all or one. But but in terms of the the a lady integration that goes via the, you know, via the the cloud. So well, like I said, same with wink, wink is a cloud based thing. I mean, the benefit is that I can access it from anywhere. And, you know, it's got a little tunnel into my network for the wink hub. But for the most part, it does want to, you know, it's funny, too. That the other thing you notice is, you know, you were trying to avoid saying the A word. And last night I was watching some stuff on Netflix and every now and then she thinks she hears something that's telling her to do something. I almost always know, you know, we got the Tivo, but I I have to go back. And I'm like, what did you think you heard that made you think you should. You know, wake up and respond to it. Some of them are really bizarre. It's like, what did you hear? Yeah, sometimes I can hear it. It's a word that sounds like her name. And I'm like, OK, but other times it's like, huh? Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, along these lines here now, Patrick has something that I completely missed when it happened. And I'm not sure I would have even thought about this if I'd seen it. So he says about a month ago, Google did an update to their Google Assistant app to support Siri shortcuts. Since I have a few smart light bulbs and plugs in my house, all that are not HomeKit compatible. That's OK. You can now use Siri to control devices that are compatible with Google Assistant. Assuming you have the latest version of that app installed on your iOS device and that you have already connected your devices to Google Assistant on your iOS device, go into settings and then go to the Assistant app preference, tap on Siri and search. You said you should see an option called shortcuts. If you don't see that option, that means you've never opened the Google Assistant app and have not issued a command. Once you issue a command such as, hey, G lady, what's the weather? Then that option should show up under that option. You will see some suggested shortcuts and recent shortcuts. If you don't see the shortcut that you want, you need to go back to the Google Assistant app and issue that command. Once you do that, it should show up in your recent shortcuts in the settings. You'll have to create two separate shortcuts, one for turning on and one for turning off. And Patrick has created a tutorial for us on YouTube. And so I will link to that right here in the show notes. And I'll drop it in the chat room for anybody listening at MackieCab.com slash stream. So yeah. And Brian Monroe is pointing out that you can use if with Siri and do something very, very similar. So now you can like have the best of both worlds, if you want, because you get the Siri functionality with your iOS device that's with you and you get to control things that aren't necessarily home kit compatible, which is cool. It's pretty good. Han, John. Absolutely. Have you done any of this yet? No. Oh, OK. I just I the way you said, absolutely. It sounded like maybe you had some maybe there was more to that. So that's why I asked. Yeah, yeah. Not at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, hey, once we when we go to this upcoming show, I may add more facets to my my environment. We'll see. Cool. Cool. Yeah, it's pretty crazy, man. I'm I my my life like I'm really I'm using a lot of smart home stuff now in a very natural way. It's pretty good. It's all pretty good, pretty stoked about it all. Oh, I'm good. My latest additions were smart bulbs. I think I do that. And those, I think, are actually pretty cool because now they're somewhat affordable, like in the tens of dollars. Yeah. Yeah. They integrate with the smart home hubs or environments pretty well. I just thought was kind of a neat idea is that the bulb itself has the radio and the well, probably not intelligence, but has a radio in it. It's got. Yeah. Yeah. And you're doing yours with the the the Wink bulbs. OK, I've got all my bulbs are Wi-Fi bulbs. And that that actually works out great because then you just it's just Wi-Fi. Right. It's good to go. So yeah, these are as far as I know. Yeah, all the bulbs I have are Z wave and yeah, I got Wink hub. So it's yeah, so it's, you know, similar, you know, using a wireless protocol to do stuff. Cool. But I like being able to operate my lights and operate my thermostats and talk to them by these means. I agree. Yeah. It's the future. No, the thermostat thing is very handy. Being able to like use your phone to set the schedule and all of that stuff is it's great. And if you're out and you want to change something, no big deal. Just do it. That's good. The thing I actually showed my family, which is that a family thing, as most people are, because it's the season of whatever you want it to be. I showed them and I actually showed them with the phone. So I don't know how I miss this, but you can now address a lady directly from the iOS app. I don't think that was always the case. Not in the it's been that way for a while, but you're right. Initially, that was not there. You had to run. There was a third party app called Astro that you could run to do that. Yeah. Right. But now I showed them. I'm like, hey, check out the smart home stuff. And I'm like, what's the temperature downstairs? As I defined an area called downstairs, it's like the average temperature downstairs. Yeah. I mean, isn't that cool? It's worth spending some time as you get more and more of these devices. I it is I have gotten more and more of these devices. I found that it started getting really confusing. You know, I've got three device. Well, yeah, I guess maybe just two devices in the living room that sense the temperature. One is my net atmo weather station. And then the other is an ecobee sensor there. And it's like, OK, I need to go in and you can. You can go into the Alexa app. Sorry. You go to the devices and and and then you can rename things or put things in rooms. And it's it's actually I found it very worthwhile to have spent whatever 10 minutes and go through that and really get it right so that I'm using the names and terms that are natural for me. And when I ask for the temperature in my living room, I want it from my ecobee, not from my weather station. And so I've just renamed the weather station to not be just living room. I think it's living room net atmo or something like that. You know, so that when I say what's temperature in the living room, I know that where I'm getting it from. And again, you know, this is like, I mean, I guess it's not round version one of smart home. We'll call it version two of smart home. The home is not really smart. The home trains you how to interact with it, right? For the most part, it's not intuiting what you want to know. It's just being a dumb interface to OK, yes, I can get that information. Well, sometimes it does. Like, for example, so to your point, the Wink app has a sensors category and anything that has anything that senses things. So it actually shows the three thermostats and it shows the temperature and it shows them as three temperature sensors, right? That's part of what they do. But if you also had net atmo and that happened to be downstairs, you would now have two devices, one from Wink, one from net atmo. And the lady can see both of them. You know what I mean? And so it's well, then you got to make the name unique enough so she doesn't get confused. And I'm saying that with some things. Yeah, as you go under the lady app and do it there and it works out. Yeah, it's good. But also the app itself. So, for example, at least the Wink app, when you add a thermostat, it's like, hey, by the way, OK, you can schedule stuff. But do you want to set a high and low point? Like, if the temperature, so I have it right now and I think the default is like the temperature gets below 40, you want me to tell you that? And it's like, yeah, probably because that's kind of cold. Right. Oh, yeah. I have mine set to tell me if it gets below 55. I don't I don't want to play with anything much below that. OK. Yeah. And then a high temp, too. But but it's nice is that the depending on the environment, that's something you may want to look for. It's like, do you want to know if. Your heats out and you're going to have frozen pipes, right? Probably. So, yes, that threshold to me, 40 is reasonable because actually, I mean, I usually keep my thermostat. Yeah, but you have five degrees. I mean, I'm going to tell you why I've chosen something above 50. And it's because your thermostat is probably on an interior wall of your house, right? So your temperature sensor is way in in order for it to get to be 40. There it's probably going to be, you know, on the outside walls of your house, 10 degrees colder. And that's why you like, you know what I'm saying? Like, yeah. So anyway, there you go. There you go. All right. Let's where are we here? Let's move on to let's go to Eric. This is another fun one. So Eric says, in the last episode, 739, you discussed the dark reader browser extension for browsing in dark mode. Thanks to you, I am now enjoying that extension along with a few others, honey, HTTPS everywhere and one password. What are your thoughts on the security versus convenience aspects of browser extensions and can extensions view and capture passwords and other sensitive information from browser windows? And if you have the time, what are your most valued browser extensions? All right. So, you know, I hadn't thought about this, right? But certainly some browser extensions like one password definitely can see your passwords. You type a password, it asks you, you want me to save it? You say yes. It knew. That's it. It knew, right? And my guess is that if some browser extensions can see your user names and passwords, then all could. In theory, we just have to trust them not to misuse that information. They can see the whole DOM, I think they can see what site you're on. How can you how can you possibly know the capabilities of the extensions? So you may ask yourself, first off, how could I work this? But second, how do you know these capabilities? And I noticed this the other day. I don't think you can. Well, yes, you can. All right. Well, I looked in Safari. I'm going to hit with some serious mojo here. So if you go to the extensions portion. Yeah, I looked in Safari preferences extensions and it's all very grand. It's not granular at all. Well, what I see here, so for example, I click on last pass. And so it shows me last pass. And then it says permissions for last pass, which page contents can read sensitive information. So it's showing. Yeah, but that's the same for all of the extensions I have, like web of trust, which should only need to see. And I don't use web of trust anymore, but I happen to have it installed. It's just not active. But it says the same thing. Web permissions for WOT web page contents can read sensitive information from web pages, including passwords. So everybody actually, I look at all my extensions and they all have the same measures. They're all the same. At least they have a message. Correct. OK. Yeah. So it says that all of them can see everything pretty much. Which they can, because they can see the whole DOM, right? So they know what site you're on and they see what you type into it. It's all there. So you got to just trust them. DOM? DOM? Do you mean document object model? I do. Yes. Sorry. I spend a lot of time with web pages. I haven't heard that in a while. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So they tell you what they do, but it's all the same. And I think, yeah, because I don't see any difference. No, I just use the arrow keys to go up and down through extensions. And like only the top half of that page changes. The permissions are the same for everything. So, so, yeah, you really do need to trust those extensions. Don't install them willy nilly. The only two that I use, and I did turn some off on my machine downstairs, but the only two that I use are one password and honey. As I mentioned as I was going through it, I noticed I had web of trust loaded and evidently I had loaded up here too. I turned that off and I had one called Amazon Assistant. And I'm not exactly sure what it does. So I turned it off. It'll give you like notification. I've noticed that they bug you to install it. I think it'll give you notifications for like orders and stuff like that. Hmm. Yes. I think it's mostly just notifications about things they think is important. And notifications are different, though. This says in the description, it says shop smarter online by knowing Amazon's best offer on products you are browsing, getting deal notifications. So there you go. And saving items to your lists or registry from any site. Please click the link above to install, et cetera. Yeah. So anyway, I turned that one off. So I use honey because it actually is handy to find deals. But I may, you know, I wish I could like, I don't know, I wish there was a way I could like only turn it on when I want it on because that would be better. I would like that, especially knowing what we know now. Well, can you right click on it? No, you can't disable it from the toolbar. OK. No, no, it's an all or nothing kind of thing. So yeah, and Brian Monroe just shared a link about the Amazon Assistant, the title of which is Amazon Assistant knows all about you. So yeah, maybe maybe I'll leave that off. But it's true, right? Every plugin knows all about you. So bear that in mind. So are you done with your list? I'm done with my list. Yeah. I'll give you my list. So let's see. I'm looking at the two machines. It's a little different. So one last pass. And you have one. Hang on one second. That's cool. All right, we're back in business. I had that weird thing where my audio is probably my issue with using a 12 year old mixer or something. But but all back in business. So if you wouldn't mind for my benefit, what what are the ones you use? So here's the extensions I use. So last pass. OK. To counter. So I guess you said you have one one password. Sorry. I think they're OK. All right, one more time. Let's see if if this thing wants to continue behaving for me. All right, John. So you use last pass and I think you mentioned honey. So I got that as well. I think you also mentioned WOT. Do you say you use that or no? OK, let's see if this works one last time before I start doing edits on the show. No. No, I don't think so. I don't think it wants to come back. One more time, John. Hey, how are you doing? So last pass and honey you use. What else? Did you mention WOT? I did. I turned it. I mentioned turning it off. OK, and the last one that I have, which I find kind of interesting, is called Ghostry. So you use that. I find it, you know, I didn't use it for a while and it was funny because somebody in one of my feeds posted and they said, oh, you know, this website I go to doesn't have any trackers or analytics or anything on it. And I'm like, really? So I activated it, went to this website. And sure enough, it didn't have any trackers or analytics. So Ghostry lets you know who's watching what you're doing. And it's not good or bad. It's just it's informational. Sure. Yeah, of course. Our site does it. Lots of sites do it. Right. I would argue mostly to your benefit. They're like, oh, what are you looking at? Oh, well, if you're looking at that, then maybe you want to look at this too. So but some people may be concerned about their privacy and they don't want things tracking them. Ghostry also has an ad blocker in it. Is that right? You know, it's weird because I got the legacy version and then they had a newer one that I looked at when I looked in the extension gallery and I installed it and actually I find it actually didn't work properly and that it wasn't showing me. The normal operation is that when you go to a website, it gives you a little bubble in the lower right hand corner of the web page and it shows you all the various services that are tracking or analyzing what you're doing. The new one has two components. One is the UI and one is supposed to be the blocking component. But I couldn't get it to work. So I went back to the the older one. OK, so it does have an ad blocker. OK, yeah, OK. Well, yeah, and then it has categories. It's like, all right, you know, you can either say, all right, we'll set it up, you know, to just block everything, which is like, or it's like, OK, well, you know, you want to customize it and only block this or that. So, yeah, that was not something in the initial version. And again, because I couldn't get the new version that's broken up into two parts to work, I went back to the old one. Got it, got it. But yeah, you've had your... You've been listening to... I mean, I'm sure, you know, especially running backbeat media. Yeah, you know about this. I mean, it's a tool that potentially could block our content, your content. Right, right. Yeah, I've always had a problem with ad blockers in that way. It's like, you know, the price for visiting the website is allowing us to show you the ads that we wish to show you. And I totally get that some people don't want to, you know, to see those and that's fine. Just don't visit the website. But to visit the website and selectively choose not to see the ads, I don't know, just doesn't sit right. I mean, all I say is that, and I've never considered using one. The thing is, if I go to a site where it throws up so many ads, typically like web versions of things, but sometimes not. Like some of these, you know, clickbait articles, you know, or clickbait ads is that once you go to the page, it's like, and this is why I got Ghostry, there would literally be some pages that would have like over a hundred trackers on them. And to me, eh. So just don't visit those sites. Well, the thing is, it also slows down the performance of the I mean, there's there's a point where, OK, I understand you want to present ads and make, make money. But if it interferes with my seeing what the heck on the page I want to see, I can't see, then bye bye. And yeah, right, just bye bye. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So of course, of course, Coolio. Well, if you want to make your stuff run faster, that is what our third sponsor is all about. And that is cash fly. You've heard me talk about cash fly for over a decade on this show, because we've been partners with them for that long. Their new solution, their web content optimization engine analyzes everything, right? 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So look, if your website is directly tied to your revenue and for most of us, it is optimize your site's content now. Guarantee the best user experience for all your customers, no matter where they are or what device they're using. And you can do this with a special thing. The good people at cash fly are going to do a free optimization consultation for any listeners of this podcast. It is just for you so you can know exactly where your site stands today with a lighthouse score report and learn how cash flies web optimization solution can help add 60 points instantly to your score. Visit Mac dot cash fly dot com. That's m a c dot c a c h e f l y dot com and our thanks to cash fly, not only for sponsoring the show, but for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. All right, John, lots of new computers being purchased now that Apple has done a refresh on two very desirable segments of the Mac line, the air and the mini. And in the forums, we had listener Alma Dean write in and ask or post and ask what device would you suggest in order to attach a newer tech Voyager S3 external drive as well as an OWC mini stack simultaneously to my MacBook Pro, both are USB 3.1 Gen one. And that's actually incorrect. One of them is USB 3.0. But that's OK. All ports on the MacBook Pro are available to use. He says I've got two USB up to five gigabits, firewire and Thunderbolt two. And he says he or she says the scenario is when I have both external drives plugged in one to run. I'm amazing for my iOS backups and the other to run time machine. Once completed, I want one keystroke command to eject both drives. So there was some discussion about making sure everything goes USB 3.0 just to get the best throughput and the most headroom on these. And I would go with a Thunderbolt two dock that gives you USB 3.0, right, the port on the Voyager S3 and mini stack are both standard USB B ports. The Voyager is a USB 3.0. The mini stack is a USB 3.1 Gen one, but it doesn't matter. It ports the port shape is USB B. So having USB A ports on your dock is what you want because very easy to get a USB three or 3.1 A to B cable. And you're good to go. In fact, your devices probably came with them. You're using OWC stuff. Newer Tech is OWC is and of course, OWC branded stuff is also theirs. So, you know, wouldn't be a bad thing to look at OWC's dock. That's the one I use down on the Mac downstairs and in my office, the Thunderbolt two dock. The Cal digit dock would work probably just as well. It's got USB three ports on it too. So I would, you know, pick your favorite. But for you, I think, you know, stick with all OWC stuff. And that way you, I mean, not that you're not that you're going to have trouble with any of them, but that would be my my route. What do you think, Mr. Braun? I'm not there yet, but I agree with the USB three and the Thunderbolt aspects of what was said. And that gets something that hooks into the. Yeah, the dock, I think is probably the solution. Yeah, I mean, they've got two USB ports on the on the Mac. You certainly could use those and forgo the expense of a dock. And maybe that's maybe that's OK, right? Maybe you're you're fine with with that, but that that it would be another option. But the dock does make life way easier. So. So there you go. I'm just not hip to all this yet, because all right. So so the latest machines have USB C ports. And you use this USB C. Correct. Well, sort of. I mean, the the USB C Thunderbolt, right? Yeah, they'll do Thunderbolt where it gets. This is where it gets confusing to me. So like their Thunderbolt ports, but their USB C ports. It's like, well, which their USB C ports, right? USB C describes the shape of the connector. The letters describe the shape, right? So B, a, right, that that's the ship. And I understand that A, B and C. Yep. And then and then, of course, there's mini B and all that other crazy stuff. But then you have the transmission protocols that can go over it. And that's where you get in USB's terms, the numbers, right? USB to USB, three USB, 3.1 Gen one, all of that crazy stuff. Thunderbolt is does not have a connector. Thunderbolt is just a transmission protocol. Right. And so, yes, the ports not like on the port on the MacBook is just USB C. It is not Thunderbolt capable. But on the new MacBook Air, yes, Thunderbolt 3 on the new Mac mini. That has like gobs and gobs of ports. I think it's got four USB A ports, two USB C ports. Ethernet, like it's like you could get that thing and never even think about USB C on that if you didn't or Thunderbolt, if you didn't want to. You've got lots of ports just right out of the box. So, yeah, it's pretty crazy. But, yep, yep, so. Yes, indeed. Any other thoughts on that before we move on? I'm still not looking forward to it. You're still not looking forward to what? Though I looked the other day, so the thing is, both of my machines here have Thunderbolt ports and there are. OWC does make a drive enclosure with a Thunderbolt connector, like it has a little lightning bolt on it. So it will plug like directly in. And I guess in theory, provide either 10, 20 or I guess 30 or however many gigabits per second now throughput. Right. But there, but I didn't find a lot of them. No, there aren't. I mean, you would only want that if you truly needed the bandwidth for that one device, right? Because otherwise you're paying the Thunderbolt tax for no good reason. Right, right. For a single drive, it doesn't make sense because I mean, the capabilities, if it took to an array, maybe. Yeah, no, an array like a, you know, they're whatever their J-BOD, whatever they call it, the, you know, just a big bird. Just a bunch of this. Judge, thank you. That that would like make sense because you want to have lots of bandwidth being able to go to it. And so as long as your disks are fast enough and the J-BOD can handle it, then, yeah, Thunderbolt would make sense on that. But, you know, USB is pretty fast. So it too could make sense for that. But, yeah, yeah, otherwise, yeah, it would be rare to have a single device on just Thunderbolt. So, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the dongles and stuff, I'm actually I'm kind of excited about it with this new air that I've got because it gives me so much flexibility. And even on my old air, right, I used a Thunderbolt connector to get ethernet and I used a Thunderbolt connector to get USB three. So I was already kind of doing this and it's really nice to be able to have power delivery through that same port. And I get that people we don't like change, right? But I'm actually kind of excited about this change. It's so much flexibility with it. So that's, you know, there you go. That's the way I look at it. We will do a after Christmas. We'll do a segment on different docks and connectors and all sorts of things for us USB-C people. So we'll go through that and Thunderbolt three people. So, yeah. Well, I'm sure our friends at ODBC, among other companies at CES are going to have all sorts of fantastic new things to show us. So, yeah. Well, and then we'll have that. That's right. Yep. That's right. Very cool. But we'll talk. We'll talk just after Christmas about about stuff that you can get now. And then and then, of course, after CES, we'll we'll add to the vaporware piles. So, yeah, it's good. Let's see, where are we here? Good, good. I don't know. You want to take us to Conrad, John? Conrad's got a good one. Sweet. Let me get Conrad up here. Where are you, Conrad? There's Conrad. All right. Conrad. So Conrad says greetings. Greetings to you. Long time less than our first time writer. I'm writing you from Northern Wisconsin. You know, Packer County. Oops, I just got caught. The cheese heads up there is not what they call them. I don't know that they like to be called that, but sure. Yeah, they do. I see them wear wear wear hats on their head with a big slice of cheese. All right. Fair. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, I'm using Charter Spectrum as my ISP. We have 100 megabit down and 15 megabit up. I'm using an airport Xtreme. It is the latest one with the latest firmware, et cetera, sixth generation for my router. I'm using their Charter Spectrum cable modem. It is an Ares TM-1602, which is a DOCSIS-3 modem. My house is ranched at one level, so no problems on the bandwidth, reaching from one end to the other. The airport is sitting about in the middle of the house anyways. I have an iMac in the basement, but that is hardwired along with two Apple TVs, which both are hardwired. So they are out of the wireless mix, just iPhones, iPads and my MacBook Pro on wireless. I was recently upgraded to the new Ultra, as Charter calls it. I now have 400 megabits down and about 25 up. Awesome. My question is they gave me a new router with this package, no extra charge, just part of the package. I have no clue if it is better than my current airport. Extreme or not. No brand name on it, just Spectrum. Bottom line, should I swap it out or just keep everything as it is? I've attached the user manual. If you could take a look to see if I should use it or just keep trucking along with my extreme. And he attached a document which says on it, RAC2V1K-router.pdf. Aha. That's a good place to start digging. Okay. You know, it's funny because I looked at this manual. And if this is provided by his ISP, all I can say, no, we're going to bring it up on the other machine here because I just noticed something about getting the right context here so I can open the manual from email. Okay. Everything all right? Yes. No, so I'm just looking at text on the bottom here. So the manual that they sent him, so it has that title. But the thing it concerns me is that what's on the bottom of the page of each page of the manual is it says downloaded from www.manualslib.com. Okay. And I'm like... I've gotten some manuals from there. Maybe that's where he got it from. Perhaps, but my concern is that, I mean, if his ISP is providing a manual that's downloaded from manuals.com, it's like, dude, really? Well, did it have the right information in it? I mean, I'm really curious. This follow does, but... So my response to them was as follows. So Conrad, I did a bit of digging and this new unit looks to be manufactured by a company called ASCII. Okay. And the cable modems are rarely manufactured by the ISP. If anything, they're co-branded. For example, the co-modem that he mentioned, the Ares TM-1602. I have one and it says cable vision on it. Yeah. So the thing is, cable companies buy it from somebody else and they make co-branded. Or like in his case, it sounds like they did it. He says it says Spectrum on it. I'm like, yay, but it's not made by Spectrum. Who is it made by? How can you figure this out? I think was your question to me, Dave. And the thing is, it took no more than doing a simple Google search. So when I searched for the title in the manual... So if you do this... Let me bring this up there. If you search for RAC2V1K, you're going to get hit. So I don't know where that number came from, but the thing is, Dave, if you do a Google search with that term, what you'll see is that probably the fifth or sixth match is a webpage at this company called ASCII. Okay. ASKEY. So Google did all the magic. I didn't. But the thing is, when I clicked on the link to the page at ASCII, it's also called an RT4230W. The reason I believe that they're the same unit is that if you look at the graphic on the ASCII page, which I would say would be the place that you want to get the information about this, versus the image in this manual, which I believe has questionable origin, they look exactly the same. So I'm like, oh yeah, that's what this is. Okay. All right. And then he's like, could I use this versus my current setup? So the thing is, his current setup... So he has the same cable motor that I do, which is DOCSIS3, and I think it's capable up to... I don't know if I can do... But it certainly has enough oomph to handle your 400 service that you've been given or 200 service, I think he said. Right. Yeah, I think he went to 250 down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or he says he now has 400 down and 25 up. That's right. Yeah. Right. So the thing is, should he go from having a separate cable modem in an airport, or should he put this in place? And I would say, based on the information that I've seen about the wireless capabilities. So if you go to the ASCII page, they say right at the top here, hey, you know, this thing's great. It's an ASCII 802.11c, it's a 4x4. And when I used our friend MacTracker to look at the capabilities of Apple's product, it's only a 3x3. Yeah. So they're both capable. But I would say one, and I made this decision that actually my parents ISP did the same thing. They're like, hey, you should upgrade your crummy DOCSIS2 modem to DOCSIS3 in an integrated thing from us. And I'm like, yeah, you know what? That probably makes sense. Yeah. So in my humble opinion, putting everything, installing the new router is the way to go because it can give you slightly better performance. Yeah, I found. And you have everything in one place. The only thing you'd be missing, now I don't know if he has, did he say he had a time capsule? I mean, if he's not using it as a time capsule, if it's just a router, then I would say, you know, put that aside for something. No, he just has an airport extreme. So there's no, there's no time capsule. And the cable mode. Yeah. All right. So this would replace your cable modem and your, and your airport. So this is an all-in-one unit as far as I can see. No. He said they gave him a cable modem and then gave him a router. The thing you're describing, this RA-C2-V1K, it's just a router. It's not a cable modem. It's a separate device. But he's asking. No, I see what you're saying. You're right. Okay. So he's asking should he whatever would plug into this instead of his airport. Correct. And yeah, what we found in our tests is that, you know, these four by four routers and you got a test because this one is a complete unknown to us, right? But in general, four by four routers where they've got four antennas per radio, generally because those antennas can be tuned and tweaked by the router itself, you generally wind up getting better connections and therefore better performance because even if your device only has two antennas, it gets to pick the best two from the router, not just the two that are there or two of the three, it gets to pick two of the four. And it really does make a difference in all the tests that we've done here with various different routers. The four by four ones go further and faster, generally speaking, than the others. So, yeah. No, I think that's good. Thanks, man. That's great. Okay. It wasn't clear to me, it wasn't clear to me if this, no, I guess it can. I guess it is not a cable modem. No, no, that's just a router. That's what he said. Yeah. Yeah. All right. While we're on the subject of cable modems, Tom writes in and he says, it looks like we'll be switching from AT&T Fiber to Spectrum Cable Internet soon, lower price and higher download speed. Fiber, he says, has better upload, but uploading has never been an issue for us. We're in Louisville, Kentucky. As an aside, I'll note where you will care about uploads is online backups and things like photos where you're sharing to iCloud and that sort of thing. But just bearing that in mind. Tom continues, what is the best modem to use with cable internet and ERO Mesh Wi-Fi? I have a 1.5 story home and use one ERO on the first floor and another on the second floor with great coverage. I've got an iMac, two iPads, two iPhones, two Apple Watches and one Apple TV. Since I've used a Zoom modem in the past when we lived in Virginia, but Zoom doesn't seem to have kept up with technology. Wirecutter recommends the NETgear CM600. Good recommendation in your experience. Is there anything better? So the short answer is that any cable modem that supports your ISP speeds will likely work just fine. That said, we like to get a little geekier here, right? So first and foremost, I kind of wanted to clear up the confusion. Zoom is still very much making cable modems. They are sold as Motorola cable modems, but under the Motorola brand, but they are most definitely Zoom modems. And Zoom is making some of the best hardware in the business these days. They tend to over-engineer the components and ensure things like extra headroom and on the signals and do a little something extra with the signal processing. I've used them and I highly recommend the Zoom stuff. Now, depending on which way you want to go with this, there's two Motorola modems that I recommend if you want to stick with the Zoom-made stuff. The first would be the Motorola 7420. It's a DOCSIS 3.0 modem, 16 streams down, 4 streams up. I used one of these for a very long time and was very, very happy with it. If you want to step up to DOCSIS 3.1, the Motorola MB8600 would be the Zoom modem, the Zoom-made modem to do that with. You don't need DOCSIS 3.1 because you're not buying DOCSIS 3.1 service. DOCSIS 3.1 modems also have all of the DOCSIS 3.0 tech in them and they support both, but you'd be paying about double to get DOCSIS 3.1. The only benefit that you mandate is that DOCSIS 3.1 modems solve the long-standing problem of a very bad queuing algorithm that's been in every cable modem since the existence. DOCSIS 3.1 modems, regardless of what mode they're up, can no longer use this crappy queuing algorithm. What that means for you and me is we don't get buffer bloat when we are sending our back-ups up and all of that stuff. The queuing algorithm really deals with that. If you want your cable modem to solve that problem, which is the thing that causes that problem in the first place, then think about getting a 3.1 modem. However, you said you have Eero. Eero mitigates this with what they call smart queue management. We called it WANport QOS for years here. Eero calls it smart queue management. That's their WANport QOS and it deals with this by not overloading the cable modem and not letting it hit and deal with that crappy queuing algorithm. With your Eero, you probably don't need a 3.1 modem, although these days it might be arguably do you want that maybe for future compatibility, but I'd go with the Motorola 7420 or the Nettgear CM600. They're both fine modems. You had mentioned Zoom, so I went that route, but there's nothing wrong with that. So there you go. Any thoughts on this, John? I'm all set right now. Okay. I love looking at the status page on mine so with the TM1602 is it that I have here? They have an option. Apparently you have to license it from the maker, but I see 24 downstream channels and the speeds that I get, I get maximum speeds on my Wi-Fi device and I will say 200 or 180, 190. But it's like, yeah. Yeah, you should. Your Wi-Fi with Eero should probably go... You've got pretty good coverage there. Your Wi-Fi should go I would say 4 to 500 megabits a second. Definitely. Yeah, if I had service at that level, but I don't. Right, but that's what I'm saying about the bottleneck there. Just the profile from your cable company is your cable modem is not the bottleneck either. Yeah, it's set to go... Well, it is in that it's programmed by your cable company to run slower than it could. As all of ours are. That's just how it works. Coolio. All right. Let's see where we are here. We've got some cool stuff found. Let's do that. We've got some good stuff here. Greg from last show chimed in. We were talking about Dark Reader which I bought and I know many of you bought. But Greg chimed in and he says, thanks for the suggestion on Dark Reader, but before going over to the dark side I found there is an option that John might want to consider while looking at the suggested problem. A program, he says another program for just 99 cents called Simple Screenshade which also has good ratings and what Simple Screenshade does is it changes the brightness of your screens to match each other and I think also does things like throughout the day so that you get some brightness changes as things dim in the evening hours. So there you go, John. Simple Screenshade maybe a cool stuff found for you. Thanks for that, Greg. Good stuff. Adam over at MACcast had a great recommendation for cool stuff found. We were talking about where you could go to find workflows aka short cuts for to use on iOS and there is a site setup called sharecuts.app and we'll put a link to it in the show notes. All kinds of things that you can do shortcuts to disable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi shortcuts to open an Instagram page and so far, I mean it's just everything. You can search through this, there's some great stuff there. It's maintained by Guillerme Rambeau who finds a lot of cool stuff in iOS so we know that there's going to be good stuff there. So thanks, Adam. MACcast, good stuff. Let's see, moving on any thoughts on these before I jump us to the next one, Mr. Braun? Alright, sweet. Michael jumps us back one episode with a follow-up and says on the December 3rd you talked about a problem a listener had with misbehaving Wi-Fi devices connected to a TP-Link router. He says three suggestions. Number one, poke around the admin settings of the router and look at the list of attached devices. Not sure what to look for, he says but just review everything. Number two, specifically look at the router log or logs that might give some indication. Number three, make a second SSID. Every router can create at least two with one being a guest network. Some routers can create more than two. He did say that with some devices powered off everything was fine so maybe segregating some would help. Maybe. And then he hit on number four. And I buried the lead here because I think he might be on to it. He says check the DHCP settings in terms of the IP address range and lease time. Taking devices off the network solving the problem indicates that maybe he ran out of IP addresses and the system couldn't, the router couldn't assign more and so devices could connect but not do anything. And you usually can increase the size of the pool by simply changing the range. Sometimes you'll see it'll go you know the range would be from say you know if the router is on 192.168.1 the range might be from .2 to .100 or maybe it's only from .50 to .100 expand that range and maybe that solves the problem. So that I like that little tip that was good. Right? Good stuff? Yes? Mr. Braun? I never had to worry about that. What do I see on my hero? It says I have 18 devices so I'm good but if you have more than 18 devices the default setting of your router may not be sufficient. And yeah, I've seen that too. Yeah, you can expand it. Don't expand it too much because you never know have they tested the device with the pool that big and will you violently crash your router? You shouldn't. Assuming that the company that made it actually tests their stuff. That's true. Yeah, fair. Fair. I've run into some shall we say economy products that I could tell that they didn't necessarily have robust testing. All the best testing. Yeah, I'm with you on that. Yeah. I have a cool stuff found and a PSA. So a CSF and a PSA tied into one. I recently realized that it had been far more than 10 years since we moved into our house. In fact, we moved into our house weeks before Matt Geekab started. We bought the house weeks before Matt Geekab started. So I know that it's 13 years or a little more which means that all our smoke detectors were more than 10 years old and it's worth replacing all your smoke detectors. So that's my PSA. After 10 years those things are not certified to work anymore and ours had gotten a little flaky. They were working too well. It would be my argument. Do you have any chefs in the house? Of course. We cook all the time. I'm guessing that's the reason for the false positives. Correct. Oh, yeah. Anytime we broiled something in the oven the thing would start going off. It was time. Here's the thing. You can go on Amazon and for 10 bucks or less buy a smoke detector. I bought the homeowner special of six of them or something for 50 bucks and put them all in except I bought two that were a little different. I bought two nest protects. The reason was I decided that while I was fine having regular smoke detectors pretty much everywhere I wanted to have some carbon monoxide detectors. So I decided the one in two locations in the house. One by the bedrooms and then one closer down to where the boiler is. I wanted to have CO detection in them and that brought the price from about 10 bucks to 25 if I was just buying dumb protectors and then there was a Black Friday deal or whatever it was and so I think for 89 bucks or something I bought two of these well, 89 each. I bought two of these nest protects and I've been really happy with them and I mean so far that no false positives but I've tested it and it works and I'll get a notification on my phone if there's a problem but honestly other than the fact that it hopefully protects my family and all of that my favorite day to day usage feature of these nest protects is its night light. It's got a motion sensor in it and it lights this very dim but very effective night light like not nearly enough to blind you but just enough to give you like to light the hallway so if you're going to pee at night or whatever you're good to go so I like that that night light is killer on these things it's great the whole family every one of them every one of my family members chimed in after I put them in it's like you know that night lights actually pretty cool then my daughter came home from school and she's like that night lights pretty cool like I know it's crazy so anyway I just wanted to throw that into CSF is the nest protect and we'll offer though that's a cool thing in any regard Dave yes because I'm looking here because I can't find the exact product here but when they had this whole nest so I guess when the nest came out with their smoke slash the detector yep at first there were a lot of false positives for a reason it was a firmware bug or some weird thing and I was like you know what let me let me look at mine and the thing is that the general guidance as you pointed out but but especially for ones so I believe the nest ones will warn you after 10 years saying well you know the radioactive element and that's what's in there right don't be scared it's not a lot but I think it's a for an ionizing smoke detector uses radioactive material to detect that something is burning or right well there's two different there's two different types of of smoke detectors now there's that kind and then there's the other there's two different types of filters I I stuck with those yes exactly yep the thing is I actually looked so I have I have kind of high-tech ones in my house not too high-tech but they're kitty I mean it's common brand yeah but the thing is the general rule of thumb these use for smoke detector especially has a radioactive element is that 10 years is useful lifetime now these had the date put in them right and the thing is after 10 years I just bought some new ones the ones I have are slightly high-tech and that they're networked in that you could wire them together so if one goes off they all go off I think with the hope that well if you're not in the part of the house is burning down will let you know in another part of the house so you can get out and not die but um no it's an interesting exercise to learn about the the technology here and that yes they will they don't last forever no they don't know and I like it's super cheap to replace like this then they'll tell you yeah get in a new one right right but there's they're super cheap to replace you know like I said and it took Lucas and I you know all less than an hour to do I think eight of them in the house we did the two nests and all the other ones and we had to rewire them because we bought different brands on the new ones alright I was out I didn't hear you now I'm back I noticed that you weren't hearing me but that's okay we all were hearing you it's all good alright well it is time to wind up with the show here my friend it's all good ah we already told you how to find us if you are a premium listener premium at macgeekgab.com is the address to use and that will get to us we do check the premium stuff first if you want to find out how to be a premium subscriber go to macgeekgab.com and that will get you there we mentioned our forums at macgeekgab.com check us out there it's a lot of great stuff happening in that community it's like I look in every day and it's like whoa so much going on so it's good I want to thank all our sponsors of course cash fly as I mentioned for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you Atlassian with Opsgene at Opsgene.com and Jamf it jamf.com slash MGG of course smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast otherworldcomputing at macsales.com barebonessoftware and their new merch store at barebones.com ring at ring.com slash MGG ero at ero.com slash MGG a couple of other new ones coming along busy around here you keep sending in your content we love it it's awesome thank you so much for listening John my friend we will talk one more time before Christmas and then two more times before the new year I hope you have a good week and I hope I hope that you don't get caught made up