 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, episode 717 for Monday, July 9th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, the show that takes all of your questions, all of your tips, all your cool stuff found, mixes it all together, presents it back to you and everyone in a way so that we can all learn at least five new things each and every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include one password. We're at onepassword.com slash geekgab. You get three months free. Cross over from Code Weavers. We're at codeweavers.com slash mgg. You can save a bunch of money and also Jamf. Now we're at jamf.com, j-a-m-f.com slash mgg. You get your first two, first three devices free for life. We'll talk more about that in detail, all of that in detail in a moment. Here, at least while we're recording this in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? Staying cool, my friend. Yeah, yeah. So we're recording this a little early. I've got some travel, then John's got some travel. And so we are recording this just a few days early for this one. But just after celebrating our country's 240 second birthday, I think, which makes us, yeah, still about the youngest country that participates on the world stage, right, John? Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, the good news is we have listeners all over the world. And we will begin answering your questions. We don't even know where most of you are from because we just, you know, it's like when you send an email to us at feedback at MacGeekab.com, it just comes to us. It's like magic. We don't. It doesn't matter where it came from, right, John? It is magic. Feedback at MacGeekab.com. That's feedback at MacGeekab.com. And that's the address that Christian sent this first note in to Christian asks. He says, when Apple enabled file sharing for iCloud storage, I was happy to be able to start pulling my family all under. Sorry, when did I say when Apple enabled file sharing? Or did I say when Apple enabled family sharing for iCloud storage? Because in my head, I heard file sharing. When he's talking about family sharing for iCloud storage, the confusion is mine. He says, I was happy to be able to start pulling my family all under one umbrella in terms of storage. We have five total users in our family, but my two younger daughters don't take up much real space. It's my 12-year-old who takes lots of photos and videos. I added all three kids to my iCloud storage with the four of us fitting into the 200-gig plan. When I penciled out the cost, I had my wife stay on her own 200-gig plan because the price of paying for those two plans was cheaper than buying the next tier of two terabyte storage for all of us. Unfortunately, we are now at the point where my wife is pushing her storage to its limit. All of our early photos from point-and-shoot cameras were put into her library. She said, we've made her iMac the center of our family media and data storage. Plus, she takes more photos on a regular basis than me. So, she's about to go over and we want to increase the family's iCloud storage plan to two terabytes, add my wife to the family usage of the storage, and then, of course, cancel my wife's iCloud storage. She said, my concern about the mechanics of this process in my home is internet usage. I'm an Xfinity customer with a one terabyte monthly data cap. With three young kids and two tech-savvy parents, we push our cap to the limit almost every month. I want to ensure that when I move my wife's storage from her iCloud to the family, that it doesn't try to upload her entire nearly 200-gig library to the cloud. That would be a huge hit on my internet performance data usage. Is this going to happen? Is there a different way to perform this operation to prevent excessive iCloud data transfer? Great question. A great, totally valid concern. So, I actually went through this 18 months ago, let's say, whenever Apple did this, because each of us were on our own storage plans. And then, when we could merge it all together, it was right away. In fact, I started moving my kids to the betas of iOS 11 early, just even on like a spare, I think I took a spare phone at one point, and just like would log them into iCloud just so I could have them join the two-terabyte plan that I had created. And then all their devices would join it, even before iOS 11 was officially released. But anyway, yes, I've been through this. And I don't think, in fact, I'm certain we didn't have any issues at that point in time with the whole re-uploading or even re-sinking thing. All that happened was a billing change, right? So, everybody's storage was virtually merged, but nothing changed. It was just like, okay, yeah, you're not paying for your plan anymore. You're on this one. In fact, I think the canceling of the individual plans just happened naturally as we sort of pulled each member into this iCloud family storage plan. So, I think you're going to be fine. That said, there are times, in fact, just, I don't know, a week or two ago, I realized that my iPhone X decided that it was time to want to re-sync my entire library. Now, this is years after we did this thing, and I never even merged into the family library. I'm the one that started it. So, it has nothing to do with that, not temporarily and certainly not coincidentally. It just happens. But even when it does that, it generally is not uploading or downloading the whole thing. It's just re-sinking with what it has out there. I've looked at data usage when that kind of thing has happened for me, and it hasn't been a problem. So, there's no crystal balls, right? I can't promise 100% that when you do this, there's not going to be some hiccup that causes it to try and move tons of data back and forth. But based on my experience and based on everybody else's, and I've been through this with other listeners, I've been through it a lot with customers, like Dave the Nerd customers and stuff, because it seems photos are the thing that everybody wants to hire me to do, which is fine. Everybody wants them straightened out. So, I have never seen it do it. I'm hoping you're not the first one. How's that sound, John? Sounds great. Okay, cool. Any thoughts on this? No, I'm, I don't know. I just have, I have 200 gigs and that's sufficient for my 120 gig photo library. I'm happy. That's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Graham Kiwi Graham, I should say, in the chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream. Hello, everyone that's joining us today for our, actually, we're doing a double feature today. We're doing 717, which is this show, and then, of course, 718 in the chat room. But by the time you all hear this on the recording, that will have passed. He asked, but what about moving from one account to another? Wouldn't that cause, you know, a re-sync of all the data? And yes, it would. But that's not what we're talking about here with Christian. His wife is going to stay on her iCloud account. He's just going to include her in the family storage pool. And again, that's just a virtual billing thing. And it's not like it's actually moving data around. So, hopefully, hopefully that all makes sense. Does it make, am I making sense, John? Usually. Yeah, that's the idea. All right. Well, I was going to go, oh, there we are. Yeah, Roger. You want to take us to Roger, John? This is fantastic. Yes. Okay, cool. Take us to Roger. So Roger wrote in and says, talk me down from this crisis. I upgraded to the Mojave beta and when I try to access a DMG file, which is a disk image, where I keep all of my tax info, I get the following pop up telling me permission is denied. It's a password protected file that usually prompts me for the password and then opens. There's a lot of data that I need in this disk image. Well, I think he may have found a bug in the Mojave beta. Could be. Maybe. Yeah, we don't know for certain, but could be. Sure. And you may ask yourself, what app is responsible for mounting disk images? So I'll tell you, it's something called disk image mounter. And you can actually see this in a whole bunch of other very interesting little support programs. If you go to system library core services, that's where that lives. Okay. Now I looked at my high Sierra system and it shows the version of that is currently 480.60.1. And they probably upgraded it in the Mojave beta. So what you could do, I see what you're, I'm picking up what you're laying down here. Well, what I'm laying down is that you may want to take the version, an earlier version, and bring that over and see if that takes care of the problem. Though it may not, but humbly, betas are betas for a reason. Right. Yeah. Yeah, this is, I mean, again, I'm assuming that this is the beta. It could be a problem with the disk image itself. And I went there too. So. Okay. Yeah. What I would do is not use a beta operating system to access critical data. And as a beta may, and it says it, and I'm sure it says it in the agreement somewhere, if you get the public beta or it's known kind of if you're a developer, that a beta has the potential to destroy everything. And I'm not kidding. And I've had it happen. Oh, totally. Yeah. So I personally would not use a beta operating system to access critical data. Now, as you pointed out, Dave, it could be that maybe somebody fiddled with the permissions on this file. So how do you figure that out? Well, what you can do is you can highlight the disk image file and then say get info. And what you will see towards the bottom of that window is a little, little sub window that says sharing and permissions. Now, in my case, I just, you know, took a disk image and did that. And it says, you can read and write. And then it shows the details. It shows me as the owner. I can read and write. And then it shows staff and everyone, which are the other groups. Can read only. So he confirmed that that was how it was. But then this gets a little bit more interesting. Let's see. So he said, all right. So he said he tried to access it with a high Sierra system. And then it sounds like that worked. Okay. All right. Well, then he got some, but then he got some, then he got some other weird behavior is that then he noticed when he tried it again, and this is, you know, also the nature of betas is that doing the same thing gives you different results. What fun. And he said, when he tried it again later, what would happen is he would get that message, but then about five or 10 seconds later, it prompted me for the password. And then it did allow access, but I still think he found a bug. Interesting. Yeah, it sounds like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, it sounds like it. So maybe he goes on and says, I wish I could avoid the temptation to install beta software. I'm not a developer and I don't know the first thing about coding or writing software. It's like a drug though. I can't seem to help myself. I understand that. It's the whole new shiny syndrome, right? And I have not installed Mojave beta on anything yet. I need to. My issue is that I have many Macs that now are out of the upgrade loop, including the one here in the studio, right? High Sierra is the last OS that'll go on it. Just because I have so many Macs. In fact, I only have one, two. My daughter's MacBook Pro and my iMac in the office are the only two machines that support metal. And metal, of course, is required for Mojave and presumably later than Mojave. But so I'm not quite ready for exactly the reasons you just said, John. I'm not quite ready to go with Mojave on my daily driver, rely on it for everything computer, which is my iMac in the office. And I'm certainly, even if this one in the studio were capable of doing it, I wouldn't. I wait six months after release to do this. But I think what I will do perhaps when I'm back from my summer travels is I'll put Mojave beta on an external drive and mess with it over there and see what happens. I may even take my clone and upgrade that or take a clone, not the clone upon which I rely, but take a clone and upgrade that to Mojave just to see how the upgrade process goes. Because I'm sure a clean install is a much different, potentially a much different experience than just taking what you have and upgrading it. And the story has a happy ending in that he said he reinstalled high Sierra and the issue went away. So I have been running iOS 12 beta on my iPad. And here's the thing, I didn't really think about this. But normally, it's like, oh, great, I take whatever my daily driver iPad is and upgrade that to the new iOS beta, usually during WWDC week. And I think I did that this time. Certainly, I did it when I got back, but I'm pretty sure I did it right from my hotel room. And that was fine. But that's also the iPad that I use and rely upon in very real time to read my scores from when I do theater shows. And I'm doing a run of Tommy, who's Tommy, well, actually, I'm playing one show of that this evening. I already went through rehearsals, and then when I get back from my travels, I've got two full weekends of it. And I've been having this problem with my iPad that actually people with iOS 11 are also having. So it may not be related to the beta at all, where it will just go to a black screen with the spinning spinning progress wheel, whatever it is, for about 60 seconds. And then it comes back to the springboard and the home screen. And then, you know, and then I can relaunch the app and it's right where I left it. But 60 seconds in the middle of a theater show, where I have to read music and catch cuts and everything, could be disastrous. So during rehearsal week, I started really digging into this. And we actually had a discussion about this in the Mac Observer staff meeting about a week ago. Because there's a lot of people, in fact, at least two others on the staff of TMO have the same issue with their iPads and are not running iOS 12. So here's what I have done thus far to mitigate the problem, and I should be knocking on wood while I talk about this because I need it to continue to work. I go in the, you know, in the Task Switcher, or whatever we call it, and I quit all the other apps except for the one that I use, which is called Forescore. And that works fine. And then I turn off all of the, I put it in the airplane mode. So I'm turning off anything that would use extra juice, right? You know, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth or anything, no cell data, obviously. It's not trying to do any updates. It's not trying to do anything, and it doesn't have any other apps running. And thus far, and this is where I really, I'm just going to lean over here if you don't mind for just one quick second because I really need to do this and knock on some wood. Thus far, it has worked. And that also has worked for the other folks that I've talked with that have this problem. And so we're thinking that maybe this is similar to what we heard about with iPhones being throttled when their batteries didn't have enough juice to keep up with the high CPU usage. And so Apple throttled them, but they don't do that throttling on iPads. iOS does not do that. So we're wondering if perhaps in some of our iPads we're having issues with power consumption versus power output of a battery. And actually now that I think about it, if that's the issue, then if I were to plug my iPad in during the performance, that would mitigate that, wouldn't it? Potentially. So I'm just, this is why it's valuable to talk these things out. What do you think, John? What do you think about this thing? Do you still have an iPad that you use that's on iOS 11, right? Yeah, but you don't use it regularly, right? No. Well, I had it repaired and some things aren't quite right. And I'm thinking of upgrading it. It's an iPad Air. I mean, it's a few years old and it's a little pokey. I'm thinking maybe a pro. I mean, I want to get a pro. I've been very happy. So yeah, I'm running a 10 and a half inch iPad pro only because when the time came to do that, the nine wasn't available. I came from the mini to the iPad pro and I was a big fan of the mini size, right? And so moving from the mini size of whatever, 7.9 to the 10 and a half on paper felt like I'm not going to like this. Man, right away. It's not too heavy. It's comfortable in the hand. I can use it while reading. Yes, of course, it's a little bigger, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Very comfortable to hold, very comfortable to use. I've got a spec folio case on it. And I really, really like this 10 and a half inch iPad pro. I'm also certain that I would like the 9.7 as well, but I have not tested that yet. But the 10 and a half inch iPad pro is very, very nice. And I used it when we were covering the keynote. I used to use a laptop to do those kinds of things. And even with a laptop, you're kind of sitting there packed in with other people and elbow to elbow and everybody's on their laptop. So, yeah, it just gets a little cramped. This time, I didn't even bring a laptop. I just brought the iPad pro and the Apple Smart keyboard, popped it on there, did it all right from there. It's much smaller even than my 11 inch air, right? I mean, it's just a better footprint, better to use, really, really smooth experience. And of course, for theater shows, having the 10 and a half inch iPad a little bit bigger, I can see detail a little bit better from further away. And so, yeah, I've been, I'm blown away that I like the 10 and a half inch iPad pro as an iPad mini replacement. Let's put it that way. Yeah. But yeah, I think you might like it, John. Yeah. Look at these things. Wow. Even in the refurb store. They're like a thousand bucks. That's what it's like a computer. It is a computer. Well, wait, we just bought, no, because the other drummer in that I'm splitting the drum duties for Tommy with another guy named George. And during the week of rehearsals, George was like, so I've never done this from an iPad before. He's like, this is freaking awesome watching you. So it's very unnerving to be playing a part and knowing that there's someone reading that part, like note for note, knowing exactly when you screw things up. But he was also, he's like, this seems much better on an iPad than it is on paper. He's like, I've always done theater shows from paper. I'm like, dude, you got to like, yeah. So we bought him the 12 inch iPad pro, the big daddy. And he got it with, I think 64 gigs and wifi only, not sell data. And I, on the refurb store, and this was just a couple of weeks ago, it was like eight something. It wasn't bad. It wasn't, it, it wasn't bad. So, so take a look. Yeah. It's the storage as, as John in the chat room is saying, that's the storage. So yeah, it's pretty good though, man. Pretty impressed. But, and, you know, while we're on, I know we're, we're veering in many, many different directions and that's totally okay. John immediately, you know, without even thinking about it, John, you went to the refurb store, right, to check on pricing. And that's the smart move. Because at the refurb store, you still get exactly the same warranty you get new. You can still add Apple care or Apple care plus, if you like, just like you could if it was new. In fact, everything's the same as if it were new, except two things. Number one, the price, you usually save about 15%. And number two, that unit itself has been through the hands of Apple engineers to make sure that it's okay. It's usually just a return or something like that. So, reliability, my experience with, with refurbs is their reliability is better than those, than that of, of brand new, out-of-the-box machines. And I've never gotten a refurb that has any, like, terrible blemishes or really, frankly, any blemishes at all on it. So, highly recommend the refurbs. Go to the Apple store, you can do it on your phone or, of course, online. Online, it's down at the bottom. You just click on refurbs and you can go through. But, inventory is limited. Like, we were looking, we were looking one night for George. We put an iPad in his cart. And then, I don't know, we delayed, we were talking about something for, like, a couple minutes. And then we went back to his cart and it was like, oh, yeah, that's gone. It's like, crap. And it was the only, you know, it was the only one left. But the next morning, I woke up and found a different one. And it was like, hey, man, it was the same one, different color. And it was actually the color he wanted the next morning. So, it was like, man, the God smiled upon you, upon you here. You know, I found this link this morning and he's like, all right, cool, snagged it. And that was it. Was it the next day? So, definitely buy refurb if you can. Just make sure you're buying what you, make sure you know what you're buying. Because in that refurb store, you might have two models old versus current model right next to each other. So, you just got to make sure you know what you're getting. Know when the current whatever was released, because they listed by originally released, you know, October 2017 or whatever. And it's like, okay, great. That's the one I want. So, anyway. And the last time I bought a refurb, here's a nice handy little service. refurb-tracker.com. Yeah. It stocks the refurb store for you. I guess they ping it every day and you tell them, yeah, here's the product. Yep. Product class I'm looking for. Unfortunately, you can't get any more specific. So, you can say iPad. So, you can get all of them. Right. Right. That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can, you can subscribe to an RSS feed from refurb-tracker. And I think you can get a little more granular with that. I was able to, I remember when I was looking for my daughter's 13 inch MacBook Pro, I think I was able to narrow it down to just 13 inch MacBook Pros for that. So, check their RSS thing because that, that might work really well for you. Yeah, it's exciting. It's good stuff. If you, if you can, the only time I've not bought refurb is if I, and I'm using air quotes here, need to get something that was just released, you know, but if you can wait a few months or whatever, then things usually start showing up on the refurb store. I need it. Oh, that's the problem, isn't it? Need or want. Well, yeah, you know, sometimes both, sometimes both. Hey, I want to take a minute and talk about our three sponsors here, John. And I'm going to start with crossover from Code Weavers. You know, it's summertime. And summertime's okay. Time to just kind of like goof off, right? You know, we can have fun in the summer. And sometimes it's too hot outside to play outside. So you want to play inside. You want to play some of those games that, that maybe, you know, you can't play on a Mac, but you don't want to buy a Windows machine. And you don't really even want to install Windows. So crossover from Code Weavers is the thing to check out. 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Sponsor number two is one password for Mac, but really one password for iOS, one password for Windows, right? One password is a password manager. You need this. You need to manage your passwords with something. And one password is my choice. I've been using it for a long time, and I continue to choose to use it. They've done a fantastic job, not only making it easy integrating with your, your browsers, managing all your data, storing secure notes, but also now they've got this cool feature called Watchtower that looks at your passwords locally on your machine and compares them to these lists of known compromised passwords that they've downloaded. So like, yeah, you can look at your password and say, yeah, that's generally secure, generally insecure, but now with Watchtower, it can say that password specifically is in one of the databases and you should change. And then it'll help you change your passwords, right? So this is great. And this way you don't have to have the same password on every site. Raise your hand if you still do that. Anytime you're logging into something and you can't use your password manager, you aren't using a password manager. I'm guilty of it, too. It's how we humans work. So use one password to unlock your password vault, and then you're good to go. So visit onepassword.com.geekgab. That's one, the number one, password.com.geekgab. Yeah, and you get three months for free when you go there. So that's the way you do it. That's how it works. Our thanks to OnePassword at the number one, password.com.geekgab for sponsoring this episode. Our third sponsor for today is JamfNOW, J-A-M-F dot com slash M-G-G. That's where you're going to go to sign up your first three devices. Actually, your first three devices on your account, not the first three. If you sign up your iPhone and your Mac and your son's iPhone, that's three devices. But if your son goes off to college and you say, well, really, actually, then you'd sort of want to be remotely managing it. But let's say your son says, I don't need you to manage my iPhone anymore because I know how to do this. Great. Now you only have two. You could add your daughter's iPhone. It's still free. So three devices are free for life at jamf.com slash M-G-G. And then after that, it's just two bucks a month. Here's the thing. It's not just for your personal stuff. In fact, it's really built for your business stuff. But you can use it for anything you want. Managing your iPhone, your Macs, your iPads remotely and managing those of others that you have to manage is key, right? My daughter's going off to school, even though she's not going terribly far away, very handy to be able to kind of help her control things set up her email. If she loses the phone or if I lose my phone, you can use it to do a remote wipe. You can configure Wi-Fi and email settings. You can protect all your company's data. This is what Jamf does. They've been doing this in the enterprise for a very long time, and they built Jamf now to make it easy for you to do it, especially if you're the one person at your business that has to manage everything. This makes it really simple. So check it out. Go to jamf.com.mgg. That's J-A-M-F.com.m-g-g. Get your first three devices free. Just go do it right now. Get it set up. Start using it. If you never have to pay for it, great for you. If you do, like I said, it's just two bucks a month per device. Our thanks to Jamf for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Let's jump to some of our quick tips, shall we? We've got some other questions. We'll come back to those. But we have a nice little story, John, about traveling and TSA that we'd like to share. Is that... No, no, it's okay. I think it's a good story. Roger sends us a tip. He says, I joined the TSA Pre-Check program, and on a recent trip to Chicago, I flew in and out of Midway Airport. When I went through screening to leave, my AirPods case containing the AirPods got swept off the X-ray conveyor and promptly fell through a crack in the conveyor as soon as they exited the machine. I saw the container hit the ground, picked it up off the ground, and put it in my pocket. Ten minutes later, as I'm strolling towards my gate, I discover the AirPods themselves must have popped out when the case hit the ground. I quickly returned to the exit of the screening room and explained what had happened. The TSA folks could not have been any more helpful. One guy got down on his hands and knees and found one on his second sweep, but we could not find the second AirPods anywhere. He says, it was then that I recalled reading that the Find My iPhone app could help find lost AirPods, so I launched it. Sure enough, as I scrolled down the screen, there was an icon for AirPods. It displayed an option to make the AirPods make a sound, so I clicked it. Sure enough, the noise was heard by one of the TSA guys who kindly brought it to me. He says, I wanted to pass along this tip, which saved me 150 bucks because I knew, I knew, that I would just have to go buy another set of AirPods because they're such wonderful devices. He says, I also wanted to send along a big thank you to the TSA folks at Chicago Midway. Since the TSA folks get a lot of flack, but they are just doing their job, and in my experience, they went the extra mile to help. So very cool, and you're right about that. Now, here's the thing. Here's the caveat with Find My iPhone and AirPods. It only works if the AirPods are not in their case. So if the AirPods are in their case, this will not work, which is why I've put a tracker on my iPhone, not on my iPhone, on my AirPods case, and then that way. So I have one of those. It's a Catalyst AirPods case, which actually seals them up nicely and actually keeps water out and all that stuff, and it's got a little D-ring on it. And then, you know, then it's also, I've hooked a little tracker on there to keep the AirPods from... Oh, the tracker brand? TRACKR? Yeah, it's a little Bluetooth thing that lets you find, and man, that thing has saved, probably saved me three, four, five hundred bucks because I'm constantly misplacing my AirPods. So really, it's totally handy to have one of those things on there. Yeah, yeah, I got a couple of those. They've hooked me up. They're nice. Tile, also. Actually, I got a couple of new tiles I gotta try out. I've never tried the tile stuff, I don't think. I mean, I think they're pretty similar. Okay. You know, they have crowd sourcing if you lose something. Well, that was the thing that I really liked about, yeah, about the tracker was that someone else could... Like, I guess somebody else in my house must be running the tracker app. I guess we've got a couple of these things. And it was like, oh, I found your things. I was like, well, I'm not at home, but cool. That's great. Thanks. Yeah, I had the same thing. I think a neighbor, so just as a test, I put it on something and said, yeah, I lost it. At some point, I guess somebody drove by and they were within range. I guess that's the only downside is that it has to be within Bluetooth range. Right, of something. But they show you, they're like, okay, there's like a thousand people on the network near you and it's like, oh, that's nice. Yeah, it's pretty cool because they don't have to know that your advice is there. They don't even... Advice. Device is there. They don't even have to know that they helped find your device. Their phone just encounters your device and it sends it back up through the cloud, which is pretty cool. Yeah. But as Graham, the Kiwi Graham in the chatroom says, crowd tracking is only good if the app has a good size crowd. And that, of course, is true. Very true. The other thing I recall, which a nod to the tracker folks is that they have a replaceable battery. Last night, checked the tile. Well, technically, you can replace it, but you'll probably destroy it. Yeah. And I had to do that to that exact tracker, because it was one that I had gotten a couple of years ago and used on my suitcase or whatever, and then put it on my AirPods after I lost them a few times. And it was like, yeah, the battery's really low. And in fact, if it has some charge on it, you can actually use the tile app to order a new battery from... Sorry. You can use the tracker app to order a new battery from Tracker. And they'll just send you one. Mine was so low that I couldn't even get it to sync with it. And so I just went to... I was going to say Radio Shack, but probably not. I think I just ordered from Amazon, you know, a bunch of batteries. I took the battery out and was like, oh, it's this kind of battery. It's one of those little button batteries or whatever. CR something, exactly. And I put it in and it was like, yeah, you're good to go. But yeah, there you go. Yeah. It makes a difference. So thanks for the story, Roger. Very good stuff, I think. Okay, Mr. Braun, let's see. Let's go to both Jacob and Gary and I think Abel in our chat room, or in our forums at macgeekyup.com slash forums. All told us about this, John. In the last episode 716, we were talking about fishing attempts and you shared a story from a reader and he was saying, or listener, he was saying how he wanted to report it to Apple. And in fact, there is an Apple Knowledge Base article, which will link to HT204759 that talks about reporting such things to Apple. In fact, there is an email address to forward these two. Report fishing with a pH at apple.com. And that's where you send those two. So thanks to everybody that sent those in from the last episode. That's good stuff. Right, John? Good. Uh-oh. Did I lose, John? Yeah, no, I'm here. All right. I know we're having some connection issues today. I don't know if that's you. Yeah, I lost some packets, man. I don't think I'm going to find them again. Yeah. I guess I should, I guess since we're having packet problems, I will open up a ping window to the external server and see if I start losing packets. Maybe you should do the same thing. I always ping www.apple.com whenever that happens. And that way I can see what my what my life looks like to the outside world. Okay. Let's see. We have, well, we have a note. You know, let's stick with the 716 ones. We'll come back to this other one. Listener Dave from episode 716. We were talking, John, about your doc moving from one display to the other. And actually we heard from quite a few of you on this. In a general sense, this is expected behavior. As Dave says, I have run into this issue as well. Apparently, if you drag your mouse to the bottom of the screen that does not have the doc and then keep dragging down a bit further, the doc will move to that display. I have recently switched away from the displays have their own spaces checkbox, which we talked about. And he says, I can confirm that this does not happen in this mode. The doc remains were assigned via system preferences displays arrangement as you described in episode 716. So thank you for that, Dave. So John, maybe, maybe you want to go back to the old way where you only have a menu bar on one screen. And then that way your doc will stay put. Yeah, it's unpredictable. Right. I'll figure it out someday. There's some app that's just not doing something right. Got it. So if you want to work with me because I had it could be my setup is just kind of weird, though, because I have one plugged into the DVI port and one in the HDMI port. It shouldn't matter. No, I'm sorry. One is in the display port. Yeah. Yeah, the mini display port. And the others in the HDMI port. Yeah. If you go into system preferences, mission control, there's that checkbox in High Sierra. It's the fourth one down, at least for me. And it says displays have separate spaces. And if you uncheck that, then you go back to the old way of doing things. And the doc for you, John, should stop jumping around. Thanks for everybody that chimed in about that, too. It's always, I love, I love the Mackie Keb family. Oh, it's good. This requires log out. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, yeah, it's a major kind of major kind of. Yeah, well, hold on. I'll be. Yeah. No, we don't want to lose you again. It's not good. Hey, so, you know, I mentioned how I replaced my UPS battery and tried to recalibrate the UPS to realize that it had more than two minutes of battery time on it. And in fact, prove that it did, because I let it run for 15 minutes before plugging it in. It still had about 25% charge left. However, that did not solve the problem. And many of you wrote in again, saying that I needed to somehow get into the UPS and tell it that the date of the battery replacement had changed. And I went actually went back to an email back in April, I think we were talking about UPSs that were making lots of noise and beeping a ton when the power goes out. And maybe you don't want all of your UPSs beeping when that happens. And most of them don't have the ability to, you know, to control that right on the front. APC makes a piece of software called PowerShoot that does not run on the Mac. And depending on which version of PowerShoot you're running on Windows, you might be able to control some of this stuff with PowerShoot. But even then, it doesn't always work well. That said, back in April, listener Aaron, or back in March, actually listener Aaron told me about a utility called APC UPSD, which is a command line utility for managing APC UPSs. And it's built for Linux computers or any computer running any sort of Unix flavor. And in fact, also includes the Mac, there is a build that you can install with homebrew just by doing brew space install space APC UPSD. And then you plug in your UPS via, and it would support serial connections or anything, but you know, it defaults the way the default configs are written. It defaults to USB, which is how most of these things are going to be on our Macs anyway. And sure enough, I installed it on my laptop. I went over, I unplugged the USB cable from the disk station, which is what is plugged into that UPS, plugged it into the Mac, ran the little APC, oh, what was the name of the utility? There's a bunch of utilities that come with it. And I think it was APC agents? No, maybe not. I'll find it. Hang on. APC control? I can't remember. I'll find it. And that was it. It brought up a little menu and it said, hey, what do you want to change? And I said, well, I want to change the APC test. That's the utility, APCT EST, right from the command line. And it's, you know, it's got all kinds of things. It's like, do you want to test the power? Do you want to perform a self-test? Do you want to change the battery date? Do you want to change alarm behavior? Do you want to change the UPS's sensitivity? You can even, on some of them, change the low and high transfer voltage where it jumps off and on battery power? Very cool stuff. And so I had it plugged in in this particular UPS, the BR1300G has a display on it. And I had the display set to show me how many minutes of battery time. And of course it says two. And I changed the manufacturer, the battery date to the date that I put a new battery in. And as soon as I hit enter, it changed from two to 18. I was like, man, like, why, why, why, why, why does that date change everything about this? So anyway, it does. And so thanks to everybody, there were many of you that sent in various ways of doing it. And I chose to do it with APC UPSD because I could do it on my Mac without needing, you know, it wouldn't have worked with crossover. I don't think. I don't know. You know, huh, might. I don't know. It has to deal with hardware and stuff. So I didn't even think about that. But anyway, I used APC UPSD and it worked great. So thank you, everyone. Good stuff. Fun. More, John, anything else on that? Ah, we're, uh, where do you get that again? APC UPSD? Homebrew. Ah, okay. Yeah, brew install. Oh, we're gonna, oh, we're gonna talk about or I'm going to talk maybe about using that for some other question. Okay. All right. Cool. I found a couple of interesting things. So the first is that, and I forget why, what I was digging into that made me find this and it's probably something. Oh, you know, we were talking about screensavers. We were talking about the aerial screensaver and all that stuff. And I wanted to invoke it manually, right? Uh, so that I could test it and, you know, see what it looked like because that's cool. And if you go into system preferences, desktop and screensaver in the lower right, there is an option that says hot corners and you can configure hot corners to do different things, right? And you just choose it's four little drop down menus. But here's the cool thing. If you don't want the screensaver to start every time you go like into the upper right corner, the upper left corner, but you want some quick way of starting it, well, here's something cool. As soon as you hold down or click on that drop down menu, but before you make a choice, hold down the command key or the option key or the control key or even the shift key and you will see it adds those to your option. So you can have it start the screensaver when you go into the upper left hand corner, but only if the command key is down, which I think is really super handy because that way you're not going to do it automatically, accidentally, that sort of thing. So I had no idea this was there until I stumbled upon it. So there you go. I share, right, John? Good. Nice. Yeah. And my wife pointed something out to me. That's kind of a cool thing too. In that same preference pane, if you go to the desktop panel, you know, you can pick which desktop picture you want. And I think she like me had like the default one that came with the OS or whatever. You can have it change the picture. There's those checkboxes at the bottom change the picture and you can choose, you know, to do it every five seconds, which might be a little obsessive, but, you know, you can also choose when waking from sleep or every day or, you know, whatever you want. And you can even pick a random order. And so, you know, you can just have different desktop backgrounds every, whenever, whatever you want. And you can even choose a random order. So fun stuff, right? Good. So something, something. All right. Harvey has a question slash tip. So let's see where we go with that. Let's put this away. And Harvey says, I'm not sure where I learned these tips on, whether Mackie Keb or by trial and error. And I think the answer is one of each says, but I discovered two interesting and useful keyboard options on my iPhone seven in a piece of writing. When I want to move the cursor around to edit something within the text, all I have to do is force touch on any key on the keyboard. And when all the keys turn black, just move your finger around, it becomes a trackpad and you're moving the cursor. He says on an iPad, it is two fingers down and then move them immediately. So you can do it without a 3D touch or force touch, whatever we're supposed to call it now. He says the second thing. So there's one tip. Thank you for that. He says, the second thing is if you are a one handed typist, and I had no idea about this, again, do a force touch, but this time do it on the little globe that's down in the lower left there to change that you would use to change keyboards like to your emoji keyboard or if you have like text expand or keyboard or whatever. Do a force touch on that? Not only do you get the keyboard list, but you get the option of shifting the keyboard itself to the left or to the right. And so you can pick to have the one handed keyboard. That's how you can get that up. I knew this existed there. If you had asked me how to do it, John, I would say I have no idea. Now Harvey has shared that. Did you know about these things? Cool little tips, right? Now I do. Cool. Yeah, and I just did a search here for iPhone keyboards and found a little article here. I think, yeah, it's talking about this one. Hey, you want to type with one hand? Here you go. Yeah, there you go. Cool. Yeah, very cool. Very cool. And in the KiwiGram, again in the chat room, MVP right for today, says that that option is only there if the current keyboard supports it. So Apple's keyboard does, he says, but the text expanded keyboard does not support left and right keyboard. So it just won't even appear. So just make sure you're on the default Apple keyboard and then you get that option to bounce around. So very cool. He says he does have a question though, John. So I think we should entertain that. He says, I love sharing this with all of my fellow iPhone users and for the most part, their phones, which have force touch in the latest software, do exactly as I explained and demonstrated. However, there are a number of phones that will not exhibit these actions. For example, when force touch to bring up the keyboard shifter, all they get is the words keyboard settings, a line, and then a list of possible keyboards underneath. And so that could be the, if they're not using the default keyboard, if they're using, you know, like Google has their keyboard, I mean, there's lots of different ones and there's some great ones that you can use to really kind of expand what you can do with things. So that maybe that's it. They've got to be using that Apple keyboard. So maybe key regram provided the answer for the question that he didn't even know was about to be asked. That's what I love about the Mac keycap family. Cool stuff, huh, John? I want to, you know, speaking, speaking of, oh, go ahead. No, no, no, go ahead. You were gonna. No, we're good. You sure? Okay. Yeah. Speaking of the Mac keycap family, I do want to take a minute and thank all of the premium contributors whose contributions have come in this week. Of course, you can learn about that at mackeycap.com slash premium on the monthly $10 plan. We have Beth B, Jim E, Ward J, Greg S, Olga P, Jason A, Bob P, Michael L, and Stephen A. Thank you to all of you. And on the biannual plan, most of these at $25 every six months, although there are some notable deviations from that, which I will highlight. But Brian D, John I, Mike M, Mary G at 100 every six months, Corey A, Jason T, Michael P, Andy W, Teresa B, Norton B, Koji M, Edward W, John P for 50 every six months, Craig S, and Joel F. So thank you so, so much to all of you. Really appreciated. And if you're interested in Able, of course, mackeycap.com slash premium is the place to go to sign up for that. And we really appreciate it. So that's what I got here, John. You want to take us to Jim? No? Who do you want to take us to? All right, jump back. Well, you lead into this one here, but now Doug, the conversion. Doug, yeah, we can talk about that. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just because I have a different solution. I like it. So I was going to skip, I was going to skip that one only because we got derailed earlier, but that's easy to fix, man. All right, Doug. Cool. So Doug asks, does anyone have a good way to convert my existing video files from H.264 to H.265? I can import files already in H.265 format, so I don't need a good MKV to iTunes, H.265 importer. He says, I use IVI tools. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Thank you. He says, I want to work on my existing iTunes library preserving the metadata. If I had to simplify more, I would like an in-place conversion, convert the H.264M4V to an H.265M4V, replacing it with the same name. So the reason he'd want to do this is that H.265 provides higher quality for lower space. And of course, that's not a bad thing to do. He wouldn't be adding any quality converting from H.264 because it's already been compressed. In fact, you would be reconverting, so probably losing a little bit more quality, but possibly imperceptibly. So the goal here would just be to further reduce the size of the library without any significant or perceptible quality difference. So that's the thing. And we're talking about when we say H.264 versus H.265, we're talking about the engine that compresses and decompresses the video. So I did a little digging. And it seems to me that handbrake is the answer, at least according to general consensus. As I said, you will be re-encoding the files, so you'll get some loss. But most people have been able to do this and have gone from 812-gigabyte H.264 files to 1.5-gigabyte H.265 files, which is really impressive. H.265 is what Apple is calling their HEVC, the high-efficiency video codec. And then we've got the HEIF, which is the high-efficiency image format. And this is all the things that they introduced with iOS 11 and High Sierra last year. So there you go. I'll put some of these. There was a Linux tech tips discussion about this, where people were getting great results. And so I'll put that in the show notes. But John, now I'm curious, what homebrew techniques you might have found that would come up with solutions here? Well, I was searching for a tool that I used many years ago in the past. So it's when I was bringing movies. I would bring my G4, I think, with me to a friend's place, and I would have files or movies that I wanted to play. But because there was a relatively wimpy machine, it wasn't able to keep up with the bit rate was too high for that wimpy little machine to keep up with. So in real time, you mean to play it crack? Yeah, it would stutter and pixelate and all that. It didn't have enough oomph. So I found this tool that would actually let me change the bit rate for the bandwidth of the video, if you will. And it's something that's still out there. And I think this will do it. So it's called FFMpeg. Yeah, and I think it's... I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure that's what Handbrake uses at its core. I might be wrong about that, but I... It could be, because they mentioned that they're used... Yeah, so it's an open source deal that a lot of people rely on to do all sorts of video conversions. Now you can, of course, go to their website, ffmpeg.org. Or... And then I'm like, you know what? I wonder if a package manager would be able to understand this. And you know what? It can, Dave. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I ran Cakebrew. And so then what I did is so I ran Cakebrew, which is the front end, one of the front ends you can use. And then I searched for FFMpeg. And there it goes. So I clicked on it. And then I'm almost certain this would do it, because when you click on something in this tool, it'll show you a bunch of things. And one thing it shows me is the dependencies. Yep. As to what libraries it needs to compile. And one is called x2.x264. And another one is x265. So I suspect this would be it. I think the hardest part here is you have to figure the the incantation to make it convert from one to the other. Yeah. And some of the links that I pointed to, I've got a Linux Tech Tips article about converting without quality loss. And then a Plex article about it. And I'm pretty sure they're both, at least one of them has some FFMpeg incantations in it to get this right. Because Plex definitely, you know, at some level uses FFMpeg as well. I think they've sort of taken it and tweaked it. But yeah. Yeah. And I was scratching my head. Maybe I'll do a search here. But I was wondering if Graphic Converter would do it though. I think Graphic Converter, although it can deal with video files, I think it's more suited to converting image files. Okay. Okay. But let me look here and see if they listen to this as an option. If they do, it's a great tool. Let's see. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. Huh. I need to start thinking about this for the stuff that I do too. Because that's, I mean, those savings, most people aren't going to see, you know, the 90% savings, but even 50% savings. That's pretty good. And so I'll put some links to this in the show notes. And John, maybe you'll flush it out with a little bit, flesh it out with a little bit more. I got to get out of the habit of saying flush it out because we don't want to flush it out. We want to flesh it out. Okay. There we go. Anything else to go on to or should we stick with the agenda as it stands? Do you want to take us to Jim? Okay. Oh, wait, where's Jim? Let me find Jim. And I will point out, you know, I didn't say anything in the intro, but this is episode 717, of course, which is the second in our series of Boeing numbered episodes. And as many of you pointed out, of course, the 717 plane does exist. When we did 707, I said we would have to skip the next one because there was no 717 plane. I was wrong and I got caught by you. So thank you for catching me. And of course, the 717 existed and has a very interesting history, right? Because it was a twin engine, single aisle, and developed for the 100 seat market. So it was originally the MD95 from McDonald Douglas. And so there you go. I'll put a link to the Wikipedia page in there. And there you go. Good. Yeah. Time for Jim, John. It's time for Jim. So Jim says, I have a Netgear Orbi satellite and router for my large home and they have served me well. But I have one nagging problem that I can't seem to figure out. When my iOS devices are connected to the Orbi satellite, I often get location errors from apps that need my current location, like carrot weather, dark sky, storm radar, maps, et cetera. Internet connectivity works perfectly. It's just that I get location errors from the apps saying I need to move to a better location or they can't resolve my location. Everything works fine when I'm connected to the Orbi base station upstairs. The problem just seems to occur when connected to the satellite. Any thoughts? Well, one thought, Dave, is that I don't think it has anything to do with the satellite because your IP address, which is I suspect what's happening here is that so when you're connected to Wi-Fi, these apps, we got to step back a bit here because there's a number of ways that you can, I think they actually call it location services. It's a service within an iOS device. And GPS is not the only way that a device can figure out where it is. As some of you may know, well, Wi-Fi can also provide or approximate your location. One of the services that do this is called Skyhook. You can go to them, www.skyhookwireless.com. And there's also what you mentioned to me, Dave. And Skyhook is doing it via prior devices, seeing that Wi-Fi hotspot, and also already having confirmed their GPS data. So it's doing it via sort of, I'll call it related GPS, where a GPS location has been correlated with and confirmed with a Wi-Fi hotspot's MAC address, its unique hardware address. And so it is like a GPS lookup for, without your device having GPS. So it's a very specific location, but it's one step removed. It's possible. If I took my router here and brought it to Vermont, someone that attached that router, if they looked up through Skyhook, might think they were in New Hampshire. But by and large, that's how that happens. So that database is sort of happening that way. And then what you were about to talk about is another way. So there's a service you made me aware of. So the other thing is, so you can check your IP address against one of these databases. Well, how do you find your IP address? Well, one way to do it is there's something called whatismyip.com, if you don't know where to look on your device. And then you could take that IP address and punch it into, and here's the URL. Yes. So we'll paste the URL, but it's a maxmind.com slash en, which I guess is English slash goip-demo. And I guess that's a front end to one or more of these databases. And we'll say, here's where I think you are. Let's see what that says. Yeah, MaxMind is, there are many companies that provide what they call geo-IP lookup databases. And MaxMind is one of them. We've actually been using MaxMind for a long time with our ad server. And there are these databases, as John just said, that relate IP addresses to general geographic areas. They know that I'm a Comcast customer in New Hampshire, and they think that my address or my address is assigned to Comcast pool in Dover, New Hampshire, which is one town over for me. So it's not perfect, but close enough for most advertising. And if you want to target somebody in New Hampshire, because you've got a service in the seacoast area of New Hampshire, well, then this is going to work out well. And that way, you're not accidentally targeting somebody in, say, Los Angeles, where that really isn't going to help them out unless they happen to travel there. So that's what MaxMind does. It's cool. Yeah. I mean, the other thing is that now I think about it, it could be that your network settings are hooked, as we like to say. That's a technical term. Stolen from Bob and Doug McKenzie, but technical nonetheless. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. Exactly. I mean, it shouldn't, unless GPS isn't available, and maybe that's it. Maybe that's why it's kicking over to Wi-Fi, because maybe you can't pick up GPS in whatever location you're at. Yep. Yep. I don't know. Yeah. So you may want to reset your network settings. That's buried somewhere. Settings general. I'll get there. Hang on. Yep. Settings general. And I think it's in reset. Yeah, reset network settings. That's not a bad idea. Yeah, that might help. Yeah, I agree with you. I don't think it has anything to do with the Orbi itself, because the Orbi doesn't provide any of this data, unless that Orbi happens to be in the Skyhook database for California or somewhere where you are not. So that could be. And Skyhook, you can look that up too. And change it, which is the handy thing. So there you go. Yeah. I remember this happening way back when they had the, remember the iFi card? Yeah. And I remember this, especially at one point I was using this, this was an SD card that would go into digital camera, but it would also use Wi-Fi location data. And it was funny, because especially when I went to like a trade show. Yep. And vendors that weren't from the area brought their setup. Yes. So the thing is, I would look at the pictures that I took at the show, and it'd be like, yeah, this was taken in California. And I'm like, no, it wasn't. But the access point that the vendor brought was key to California. So it was. Isn't that interesting. Yeah, it totally makes sense, man. Yeah, yeah. I like that. Here's the other weird thing I get. So I don't know if you play Pokemon Go, but I, you know, I like fiddling with it. And it always places when I catch something, it always claims that it happened in Norwalk. Why is that, Dave? I don't know. Because when I bought my phone many, many years ago, I bought it in Norwalk. Or it's a Norwalk number. It comes up as a Norwalk number, even though I live in Fairfield. That's true. Yeah, that's right. And apparently they're using my phone number to determine the location that, where something happened. Like, no, no, no, that wasn't, I rarely go to Norwalk. That's weird, man. Because I've played, like, yeah, I don't, you might have a different problem. You do have a Norwalk number. And, and quite ironically, you and my mother have cell phone numbers that have, I think your last two digits are transposed with each other. Actually, your last four digits, because the last two of your phone number are, are repeated, right? And, and so your last two and, and her second to last two are, are just reversed. But anyway, we've played, we've all played Pokemon Go when we've never had it. Like we played, we started playing in, in when we were in Europe two years ago, and it definitely was not misassigning things to Durham, New Hampshire. So I don't think it's your phone number, man, because people, I mean, if they did that, everybody would have a problem. There's so many people that have phone numbers from, you know, like people generally get a cell phone number and just keep it now. And it doesn't really matter where, you know, like area codes don't mean anything anymore. So I don't, I don't think they're keying off of that. I think you might have something else going on. Yeah, but I'm definitely not in Norwalk when, you know, I mean, it, the bulk of the things that I've caught all, all I say, yeah, it was, it was done in Norwalk. And I'm like, no. What happens if, you know, you're in like, you know, Vegas and you catch one, does it still say Norwalk? Oh yeah. Oh no, I have, I have creatures that I've caught. Yeah. Like in airports and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Wow. Huh. That's weird. That's really weird. I'll ask Lucas, my son, because he, I know he plays more, maybe Lisa plays too. Anyway, we'll dig into that. We'll revisit that. I wanted to, there's a couple of things I want to share, but the first is the folks at TP-Link have long made one of my sort of more highly recommended router mesh systems, which is the TP-Link deco. And the reason I recommend it is it, you know, it's very sort of run of the, I don't want to say run of the mill, but that's what I'll say. It, you know, it doesn't, it has actually has some cool features, but by and large it's just, well, really the reason I like to recommend it is the price. It, you know, it was like super, super inexpensive compared to all of the other mesh systems. I think when I last updated my mesh article about a month ago, the TP-Link deco was like, you know, $2.28 or something for a three pack. So, you know, really, really aggressively priced and works really well. I've got a couple of family members that use them and they're, they're great. They just came out with an update that they, hardware update that they're calling the deco M9 Plus. And this changes some things very, in some very, very cool ways. So, now it's got three Wi-Fi radios in each unit. Previously it was just a dual band thing. So, tri-band Wi-Fi radios so that you can really, you know, start to help with those, you know, plus 100 gigabit, sorry, not 100 gigabit. That'd be nice. 100 megabit speeds, you know, for, for those of us that have, you know, faster speeds and, and might be using more of that with our devices in the house. They've added, it now has a quad-core CPU in it, which really helps with both routing and with its built-in intrusion protection, which the original version also had and does a great job with it. So, it can do all that packet inspection and make sure that your, your stuff isn't getting in the way. So, it, you know, it's a, it's a hardware update to sort of get it into today's world with the, you know, the three radio things from places like Orbi, like you just mentioned, John, or Eros got their, their tri-band and Linksys has their tri-band. But what they're doing with this that's different from what anyone else is doing is that they have put a ZigBee radio in this thing, right? Yes. And so, it can be your smart home device hub. You don't need a smart things hub. You don't need a Hue bridge or, you know, any of that because it's ZigBee and it's not just one ZigBee. It's as many ZigBee bridges as you have Deco units. So, the default kit comes with two of them and the, it's, I think it's 300 bucks for a, it's $2.99 for a two-pack. And so now you've got ZigBee bridges wherever you have Wi-Fi access points. And, and this obviously provides benefits in two ways, right? Number one, you don't have to buy a ZigBee bridge. You certainly don't have to buy two of them because you're getting them and that's handy. But, and, and of course, you're able to put them, you know, in, in different areas of your home. But where it gets really good is that you're not supposed to place your ZigBee bridge right next to your Wi-Fi router because the two things can interfere with each other. But about a year and a half ago, I was talking to a Qualcomm engineer at CES who told me about the chipset that we're now seeing in, in this router. And he was saying, oh yeah, we're putting all our, like we're putting the ZigBee and Bluetooth Low Energy right into the same chipset so that we can do the, the, you know, coexistence calculations and have these things not interfere with each other and they can all be in the same unit, which makes a lot of sense. So the only thing that I've seen that has done anything like this, John, is Eero and they put a thread radio in their newer stuff. But of course, there's, I don't think there's any devices that support thread yet, but there's tons of devices that support ZigBee. So yeah, it's got, you know, six Wi-Fi antennas because in each unit, because each, each one, each radio is a two by two. So six Wi-Fi antennas there and then a Bluetooth antenna and a ZigBee antenna. So eight antennas inside each unit and gigabit ethernet ports and all that stuff. And because it's, it's this, you get one app that controls all of it and TP-links apps are supported by, you know, all of the Ift and Stringify and, and then other things. What was the, I found two last night that are really interesting, two smart home apps, Yonomi, Y-O-N-O-M-I and Yeti, Y-E-T-I that are like one app to rule them all sort of smart home things and the TP-link stuff appears there too. So DecoM9+, very, very cool. I'm excited to see TP-link continuing down this path, which is great. Awesome. So just wanted to share. Pretty cool, huh, John? Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Wish I knew about that before I bought my hub. Well, not really. Right. Right. Well, it didn't exist. I mean, it just came out in the last couple of weeks. So there you go. No, but that's smart because, yeah, they're all radios. That they're all radios. Yes. Yep. Now it only has ZigBee? Correct. Okay. Not Z-Wave. Not Z-Wave. A popular one. Yeah. Is Z-Wave still popular though? I mean, for the most part, any devices I'm seeing are all ZigBee or their own proprietary thing, but the general stuff is all ZigBee from what I've seen. The Hue bulbs will support it in their bridge and all that stuff too. Yeah. Actually, the two bulbs that I have are ZigBee or actually three bulbs. Yep. Yep. We talked about the, and I mispronounced it, the LIFX bulbs, the LIFX bulbs that are Wi-Fi bulbs. I just got to check out a LIFX mini color. I tell you, this thing's freaking awesome because with Wi-Fi, you don't have to worry about the hub or the bridge or anything. It just connects to your Wi-Fi network and the LIFX bulbs in addition to supporting, of course, Amazon's A-Lady and the Google Assistant also support HomeKit. You just bridge it all to everything and it connects to your Wi-Fi and it's good to go. They're not cheap, but you don't need a bridge. I think each bulb is 39 bucks or something for the full color and 26 or 25 or something for the various shades of not color like just white, yellow kind of thing. Yeah. But for light bulbs, really for anything that's plugged into AC power, I think the Wi-Fi, direct to Wi-Fi is the way to go. After having experienced bulbs that need a bridge, I'm not convinced that that's the right way to go. I mean, you've got plenty of juice. You can power a Wi-Fi radio. You don't need to go with this low energy stuff. Some things do need to go low energy and there's a huge place for the whole ZigBee thing. I'm not necessarily downplaying that, but for bulbs, you don't need it. Sometimes my bulbs won't respond if it's one that's in between the areas where it gets coverage. The Wi-Fi bulbs have been great. I was looking on Amazon. I haven't messed around, but you can find off-brand Wi-Fi bulbs now full color for 15 bucks. They won't support HomeKit and likely never will, but they do support the others, the Amazon and the Google Assistant. It's worth checking out. At some point, I'll probably bite the bullet and spend, I don't know, 50 bucks on some various off-brand things just to see how they compare so that we can report back, but there you go. Fun, huh? Good. Man, let's answer one question that's been lingering out there. Rachel on Facebook asked in our Facebook group, which actually she posted long before we started our Q&A forums at mackekeb.com. But Rachel asked on Facebook, she says, I have my MacBook Pro and my iMac scheduled to reboot once a week to clear out the caches. The question is, will they still reboot if they are asleep? The MacBook Pro is closed, and then the second question is, is this still something that I should be doing? Yes, they will reboot if your Mac is asleep. Your Mac will actually wake up to reboot, which seems like a strange thing when you look at it that way, but it will work that way. Yeah, I don't know about you, John, but I still find that rebooting, if I don't reboot once a week, that's when strange things start happening to me. When strange things start happening to me, and I look at my uptime, it's always like 10 days, 11 days. It's like, oh, yep, I keep forgetting. I think that answers Rachel's question about the waking up. What do you think about the rebooting once per week before we say goodbye to everyone today, John? I think your amount of uptime is like a badge of honor. Rebooting is throwing in the towel and admitting defeat. I typically don't restart unless things start not working the way I expect them to. A lot of it is just memory leaks just growing and growing. As was said, caches, I don't know if rebooting necessarily clears up. I guess it does clear out some caches. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, for sure. Not all of them, but yes. So I don't make it a practice, but when things go south, yeah. I always make sure that before we start recording, this machine has less than seven days of uptime, and that has proven quite valuable for me. Now, the main Linux box that we host, Mac Observer and our live stream and all that on, so that's actually on a low number of uptime right now, because it's only 199 days. We had to do some maintenance actually to power supplies and stuff that required a reboot 200 days ago. Otherwise, that's hit four or 500 days of uptime, but that's different. It's a server. We're not constantly launching and quitting different apps. It just does the same thing all the time. If you do want to wear your uptime as a badge of honor, though, as my esteemed colleague mentioned, some people do, and there's nothing wrong with that. Well, there might be something wrong with that, but one way to sort of mitigate these things is to log completely out of your account. Don't just let your Mac go to sleep, log out, log back in. That does not reset your uptime, but it does clear out a lot of that stuff that can be funky. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. All right, John, that's what I got for 717. I'm looking forward to 718 though, you know, just how it always goes. What do you think, man? I'd rather look forward than look back. Well, that's how it is. That's how life goes, man. Yep. We told you how to email us, although we didn't tell you premium folks. We didn't remind you that you have access to our premium at MacGeekEv.com address, so please take advantage of that. We certainly pay attention to that first, but we do try to answer everything that comes in. That's the secret. If you want to call us, 224-888-Geek is the number, John, and 224-888-Geek is 4335. Come visit our forums, MacGeekEv.com slash forums. We'd love to see you there. There's lots of great stuff happening there. In fact, Kiwi Graham copped to sharing the answer to the earlier question as one that he got out of the forum, so I like it. It's good. It's good. I want to make sure we thank Cashfly. So thank you, Cashfly, for providing all the bandwidth that gets the show from us to all of you listeners. It's great. Of course, our podcast marketplace includes lots of great sponsors. We've got LinkedIn.com slash MGG. We've got OnePassword.com slash GeekGab. We have CodeWeavers.com slash MGG. We have Jamf.com slash MGG. We've got Barebones Software at Barebones.com, Otherworld Computing at MaxSales.com, Ring.com slash MGG. Smilesoffered.com slash Podcast. So many great folks helping us continue to do what we do, and that includes, at the top of the list, all of you. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, and, I mean, thank you. And thank you. And John, thank you. But also, don't get caught.