 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekgab, episode 655 for Sunday, the final Sunday in April the 30th, the year 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekgab, the show where the goal is for all of us to learn at least four new things. We do that by answering your questions, by sharing your tips, by sharing your cool stuff found, and that way we all, every single week, are able to enhance our knowledge and expand our minds together. Sponsors for this episode include Blue Apron, where at blueapron.com slash MGG, you get your first three meals for free. From this awesome, it's a recipe and ingredient delivery service. It's really actually very, very cool. We will talk about that shortly here. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in Triple Connecticut, John F. Braun. How goes it, Mr. F. Braun today? If I didn't know better, I'd say it's winter, Dave, because there are things falling from the sky, but they're not snowflakes. Yeah. I wish I could take my eyeballs out and just scratch the back of them a little bit. That's all I want to do. That's really what I want to do. Most of the time when we come here, I'm happy to do the podcast, and I'm happy to do it today, but it is the thing I want to do like most at the top of my list. Today, it is a second, and I'm going to be honest, it's a distant second to wanting to take my eyeballs out and just scratch them to alleviate these symptoms of the allergies that the allergens that seem to be in the air here. But alas, I cannot do that. So number two is you folks, and I think we're all going to be okay with that. Yeah. How about you, John? Yeah. Are you suffering symptoms? Here and there. Yeah. Not as bad as some people. Yeah. I'm not usually too bad with allergies, but it happens about once a year. The trees and the plants waging war. Oh, against us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. All right. Let's do a couple of things here. We have some cool stuff out, so let's just start with that. Rico writes in, he said, I was having lunch with some friends today, and when paying the bill, I thought of you. You see, my friends and I could split the bills properly, aka go Dutch. He says, heck, I am so close to the Netherlands that cultural gravity should have my friends and I going Dutch. However, we have a more fun way and it involves an iOS app. The way my friends and I decide who pays is by looking at our balance on Splitwise.com. This is how it works. Whoever paid the bill enters the amount on Splitwise. Splitwise splits the bill between the participants and everyone gets notified. Each person sees how much he or she owes to someone else. The next time we're out for lunch, we pull out our accounts and the one with the highest red number, aka the person with the highest debt that person pays for everyone. This friendly banking system keeps the ball rolling on our weekly lunches. Anytime I am owed the most, I badger my friends to go out for lunch. I like this. This is pretty good. This is this is actually a real problem. You know, it's like who got it last time. This that whole thing that happens, Splitwise deals with it. So, I like it. Thanks, Rico. That's pretty good stuff, man. That's how it works. And like he said, there's an iOS app and it's also all available at Splitwise.com. So, cool stuff. We're going to start using that, John, when you and I go out for lunch. Don't you think? Why? Oh, why? That's right. It's not like we, yeah, I think the strategy for when we go out to lunch is pretty clear. We eat. Yeah, but but I do appreciate a program like this because if you recall, especially from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it was actually, this whole scenario was used to fuel a random number generator for the infinite probability drive. Oh, nice reference, man. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I like it. I think it was. No, I think it was used to power another one in another guy's ship. But yeah, otherwise it could appear to be a random phenomenon. That's right. It brings order to chaos. I like it. That's right. The next thing on our list here, John, is from Scott. He says, I've tried about a dozen different brands of earbuds to find the right combination of quality, sound, fit and comfort. Bluetooth earbuds never seem to work consistently and the sound is always meh, and they depend on battery life. As a result, I've switched to wired earbuds and found that apples are simultaneously the best and the worst. We're talking about Apple's ear pods here. He says the audio quality can be debated. It's sufficient for my needs. My needs, says Scott. But for phone calls, their microphone is unsurpassed. What has been consistently problematic, though, is the fit and comfort. The Apple earbuds material is slippery and constantly falls out of my ears with the slightest movement. Enter ear buddies with a Z for $10 for two pairs. And when slipped over the earbud, they provide just enough friction to keep them firmly planted in your ear or my ear, he says, without ever falling out and dramatically increasing the comfort level. Please tell the rest of the Mac Geekgabbers that these things are the best $10 investment in my productivity that I've ever made. He says I bought them on Amazon. And, of course, we'll put a link in the show notes for all of you. So, yeah, very, very cool. I like things like this that take what should be universal fit and turn them into, you know, it's still universal fit, but not universal for everyone and tightening up that seal. They have like a little, they've got a little nub around the top that helps lock them into your ear from what I can see in the pictures here. So, very good, fun stuff. Moving right along, right, John? We're going to move along. Yeah. Okay. Moving right along to Douglas. Douglas says, I found a pretty awesome iPad app called Nebo, N-E-B-O. It's a note taking app that right now can only be used with the Apple Pencil or Windows Active Pen. Rather than explain it, I suggest you go to their website at myscript.com slash Nebo. He says, and you can check out a short video there, he says, the text recognition supports many different languages. And I was surprised that it even supports Japanese, which I tried and was quite impressed with. Doug is based in Tokyo. He says, if you have an Apple Pencil, it's well worth the time to download and give it a try. It's a free download for a limited time. Very, very cool stuff. Thank you, Douglas. I like this kind of thing. I don't have an Apple Pencil because I don't have an iPad Pro because I like the smaller form factor of the iPad mini, but it seems like that might be going away over time. So maybe someday I will have an Apple Pencil and we'll go from there. But I know Gamut loves his, some good stuff. Any thoughts on that, John? All right. Are you still with me, John? Yeah. Yeah, I can have another gulp here. Yeah, I'll say. No, I'm pencil-less right now except for the mechanical variety. I, you know, and I want to make sure I talk about the right model number. But when it comes to styluses, I really, really like the Jot from addon at adonit.net is their website. I use the Jot Pro and then in my gig bag, which also then becomes my travel bag, I bring a Jot mini. The great part about the Jot Pro and the Jot mini is they have a little circular disc that's transparent at the end of it. And the reason is your iPad, a normal iPad we're talking about here, not an iPad Pro, which has a much higher resolution for the digitizer. But the digitizer on a regular iPad and iPhone is built for your finger. So it needs to see a sensor area impacted by a pretty large amount of space. Putting just a pen on there generally won't trigger much. But the way it works with the Jot Pro is because you have this big circular disc, that's enough of a pressure area for it to register. But because it's clear and connected by a very fine point to the remainder of the stylus, you can see what you're writing. Your view is not blocked by whatever it is that has to make this big impact on the screen, on the digitizer. So it really makes it easy to write. I use it all the time for my music stuff because I have to occasionally jot out, and there's the word, right? But I have to write down or scratch out little musical figures. Like I'm doing a theater show this weekend, and occasionally there's little notes I need to make. And sometimes those notes can be text, and of course I can type those in on my iPad. But other times, I need to, like this, the most efficient thing is for me to just write out a measure or two of sheet music to give myself a rhythmic figure or something to do. And doing that by hand is by far the easiest and most efficient way. And by using the Jot, I can totally do it right on the music that I've already pulled in as a PDF in the app that I use called Forescore. And it works really, really well. So I like them. I like the Jot Pro quite a bit. It's a fun little thing. So I will put a link to that in the show notes. And I'll also put a link to the app that I use called Forescore, which at Forescore.co, it's a fantastic app for exactly that. And it's, when I say Forescore, F-O-R-S-C-O-R-E. So there you go. Good stuff. Any thoughts on that, John? You don't say you don't use... Forescore in seven years ago. Forescore in later on tonight at seven o'clock. I do the last show of First Date. So there you go. Oh, I'm doing something too. Are you finally a week later celebrating your birthday with your family, John? Well, we consolidate these celebrations since we have multiple birthdays. We could celebrate each one individually, but it makes more sense from a logistical point of view to kind of consolidate that thing. Sure. Yeah. No, we do that too. That's kind of how it works. My poor kids, their birthday is right in between. They both share a birthday. They were born the same day, two years apart, and it falls right between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Especially when they were younger. They're starting to use to it now, but when they were younger, there would just be this month of gift-receiving events for them. Yeah, it would start at Thanksgiving because obviously they were, or not obviously, but some years they were, some people they would only see on Thanksgiving and then maybe again on Christmas. So it would be like, all right, we'll do the birthday a little early and Christmas on Christmas. Right, but the birthdays far enough away from either of those two so they don't risk a dilution of... Oh, no, there was definitely a dilution for the kids, for sure. No. All right. So it is close enough to... Oh, yeah. I mean, it's right in between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's all going to be one together. So here's your combo birthday. There were some of those. Yeah. We tried not to do that to them, but you know, I mean, whatever. This is how it works. They're very spoiled regardless. Lucky to get anything at all. Yeah, they know how spoiled they are. They do. They really do, which is good. I mean, it's just, you know, it's awareness that's the key. Hey. Acknowledge your privilege. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So speaking of that, my daughter is looking at colleges now because she'll be going off in the next couple of years. And we spent a couple of days in Manhattan looking at schools earlier this week. And I met with someone who made a cool stuff, a previous recipient of a cool stuff found mention. And that's Alan Hirsch, who makes the Handel case, H-A-N-D-L case. And we had lunch together. And I've experienced this case, but when he sent us one, it was for the plus size iPhone, because it seemed to me that what this case does made more sense on that phone. And at the time, my wife had started using the larger iPhones, and I was on the smaller ones. So I never... I experienced it briefly, but I never quite used it. And of course, after we had lunch with him, Alan gave both Skyler and I handle cases for our iPhones. We've got the regular-sized iPhones. I've got the iPhone 7. But we were in Manhattan. And so we ate lunch, and then we had to go visit another college or whatever. And I think maybe we took the subway or at that point or just walked. I can't remember. So we had these cases. And what the Handel case is, is it's a normal case for your phone. And on the back, it has a little... It's a handle, but the way it works is there is a piece of stretchy fabric that holds on a firm piece of plastic. And depending on the case, the plastic can be wrapped in metal or whatever. It's really hard to describe now that I'm trying to describe it without you seeing it. But it's worth going to handleberation.com. And what the idea is, is you slip two or three fingers sort of between the phone and this elastic attached piece of plastic. And it keeps the phone on your hand without you having to grip it. And man, within about a block and a half of walking in Manhattan with our phones out like this. I was trying to look at maybe walking directions or finding whatever subways we needed to take in Google Maps or something like that. Skyler was of course keeping posted on social media and keeping all our friends posted with the schools that we have visited and all that stuff. And we both turned to each other and we said, this is the most amazing case we've ever used on our phone. Because for walking around and that kind of stuff, it's great. And then because of the way it works, you can take this little, the handle that's on the back and fold it back into the phone and use it as a stand in either landscape or portrait mode. And we've been doing that now every time we get a FaceTime call from the other half of our little nuclear family that is still visiting China. So I highly recommend these cases. You've got to check them out. I certainly talked about them here, but I hadn't really experienced it. It has not come off my phone since we put them on, you know, on Monday or whatever. And I don't expect it will for quite some time. I really like having this extra way of holding the phone. So you got to just go check out the video at the very least. There's a video on the side of Alan sort of demoing this thing. But yeah, you got to check it out. So highly recommended. So cool stuff found reprise we call that folks. I'm going to throw my hat in the ring. Yeah, throw it in the ring, man. So here's something I received kind of out of band and I think it's something worth looking at. So you know how you're always losing things, right? Yeah. We all lose things. Just place things. Sure. There are several products out there, Dave. They will help you find your thing. Right. They're all pretty much a variation on it. It's a Bluetooth thing. Right. Right. Right. And you got Tile, you got Tracker, you got a few others. Those are the two that I've used and they do their job. But there's only so much they can do with the current technology. Sure. Or with the Bluetooth technology. Well, there's something new, Dave, and I received a unit to look at. Okay. And it is way, way better than all the others. Really? And it's called Pixie. P-I-X-I-E? Like in a little Pixie. But if you want to get info about the product. Yeah. Okay. All right. Go ahead. It's at getpixie.com. Okay. And I guess the point is, so it does two things. So the one I'll talk a bit about technology and why it's so much better. So a lot of these devices, when you want to find something at most, they can say, okay, yeah, you're getting closer, you're getting warmer or you're getting cooler. Sure. Remember the old game. That's pretty much the best a lot of these other things can do. They can only tell you if you're getting closer to or farther away. They don't really give you the concept of direction in that you should turn this way or you're this far away from it. Right. Well, that's exactly what Pixie does. And I'll tell you, well, here's how they do it. So you got to follow the rules. So what it is, is that you get, you need at least two of these. And that's part of the secret here. So one of them, one of the Pixies you put on your phone. Now they give you a case or I think it's a, you can actually get a case or you can just stick it on your phone. It has a piece of, and they come in, as you might assume, since you need at least two. So they come in two packs and four packs and multi packs. And the more you buy, the more you save, you know, you get. Of course. Of course. Yeah. What do they, what do you pay for, for one of these things or what's a three pack cost? Right now. So two pack is $49.99. Okay. All right. So relatively inexpensive. And it looks like they have a sale. So the four pack, which is what they sent me. So it has four units, one for your phone and then three for your things. That was $99. And now it's $69. They also have a six and an eight pack. So. All right. Good. Okay. But here's the thing. So you put one on your phone and then one on the thing that you want to connect. And what they're doing is, I don't know if I'd say it's triangulation. I read a bit about how it works. And actually, so here's what they're doing. So because they have two units here and they're doing some special algorithm, they can tell within inches how close they are to the device that you're looking for. And also they include an augmented reality portion that you don't have to use it. But if you'd like to, where you hold up your phone and then you can see using your camera, it will show you visually. Now here's the fun part. Say the thing that you're looking for is behind a wall. Well, it doesn't care about walls. It'll be like, yeah, I think I see your thing through this wall. So, you know, don't walk through the wall. Maybe walk around it. And here's the thing I'm looking for. What I like also. So one thing is that the distance measurement because of the technology they're using is scary in that the direction and the distance you are from it, you can see. The thing is you can also, so each of these devices have a tiny little LED. And if you'd like to, you can make the LED blink. So especially if it's at night, you could find whatever it's attached to if you could see the LED. Wow. So they really took it above and beyond. They didn't do, on the one hand, they're not compatible as far as I can see with the other products. They all kind of follow the same, you know, algorithm and rules and stuff like that. On the other hand, these guys do a way better job. The only I would say not downside, but it's a feature of some of these other ones here is that the battery is in there and it'll last about a year and a half and then you have to get another one. Right. Okay. But that is that to tracker doesn't but but in exchange for the benefits that you get in that it's again, crazy accurate. Yeah. It's something new on the scene that I thought it was worth mentioning because it really does do something outside of what all these other guys do. Right, right, right. Huh. That's pretty cool, man. Hey, all right, I have another, another audible to call here because I'm pretty excited about this thing, even though it's it's not quite vaporware, but it it's also doesn't exist yet. So anybody that's listened to this show long enough that cares about podcasting has either asked and been answered or has intuited and figured out that what we do to record here is we record live. Right. So I have I actually use an outboard mixer and I have my microphone plugged into it, but I also captured John Skype audio and plug that into my outboard mixer and then I captured like the theme music and the questions from you folks that we play and all of that. And I plugged that into another channel. And this is all kind of a crazy convoluted setup. And then I, I route everything except John's audio back in to Skype so that John can hear everybody but himself. So he's not hearing himself on an echo. And then I route the entirety of the audio, including John back in to be recorded. And I use an app called Audio Hijack for that. The beauty of this is that I can then use outboard gear like compressors and limiters and noise gates or expanders really to make it so that I'm mixing this live like an old school radio talk show would do. I in my ears am actually hearing the final product, not the premixed product. So if I feel like I'm too loud, I can and we do enough post not post processing, but there's an engine we run it through this experiment that I'm about to do right now might not work. But if I find I'm too loud, I can turn myself down or turn myself up. And all of this happens live. And I hear it in my ears. That way we don't have to spend a lot of time on post production because I hear what's going into the recording. And then we just send that out to you. And that was designed intentionally 12 years ago when we started this podcast, because I knew I might not always have to I wouldn't always have time to post produce the show and send it out to you if it needed three hours of my, you know, tweaking and post production. There's nothing wrong with with people that choose to do that. It's just not something that it's in my schedule. And I know I want to get this show out on time every week. So but that's a really difficult thing. A for me even to travel with, right, because I've got all this outboard gear and mixers and all the crazy stuff, but also very, very difficult for anyone to set up. I happened to have a lot of this type of gear. Of course, it's all been replaced over the years. Although the mixer that I'm using is I think about 10 years old. It's a Mackie Onyx 1220 mixer. But the, you know, the general concept has always been this way. I would like something portable to do this with. And I would love it if other podcasters, even the ones that like work for me at TMO that, you know, like Jeff Gammett that's that's doing our daily observations podcaster, John Martellero, with his awesome background mode interviews with yours truly, I believe is on this week after 82 episodes. So I'm excited about that. But I would love to be able to set people up with something like this. And I might be able to do that because Adam Curry, the person who, yes, started life, well, started, I mean, started his public life as a MTV DJ, at least in terms of what those of us in America know. And then also started podcasting back in 2004 with Dave Weiner. And then some call him the Podfather. That's right. Yeah, he's the Podfather. That's right. But he has used exactly the same setup because he comes from that radio world and he wants to do it for the same reasons I do. He wants to hear it in his ears. And in fact, it was his rig that inspired me to set mine up this way. It was like, Oh, that makes sense to me. And hey, I'm lucky I have the gear so I can do this. He has started a Kickstarter at small batch dot audio that is making a product called the Podcaster Pro. What this is, is it's a box that plugs into your Mac with USB. It has two microphone inputs on it. So I could have, and it's true. I mean, here, if Pilot Pete were here, he would just be on a different microphone from me plugged into the board and I would mix him as what I'll call the fourth channel. So it's got two microphone inputs. It's got two, and bear in mind, this is weird, two USB audio devices that it creates. Most of the time when you plug in a USB audio device, it creates one. It's a simultaneous input and output device. This creates actually two. One of them is for recording the entire mixed product. The other is for sending to Skype. So it solves that problem, right? Which a lot of these other things that have been built for podcasters don't do. It also solves the problem of you wanting to play audio files from your computer and mix those live. So it has an outbound channel built for that that then also goes back into Skype and into the recording. It was built, obviously, by someone who is doing this with all this other gear. He too wants to travel and he too wants others to be able to do this. So it's called the Podcaster Pro. You can look and learn about it at smallbatch.audio. I believe he has said that he's targeting $4.99 as the price for this thing when it comes out. They are going to do it via Kickstarter. They have designed this thing. They have worked on it for the last year. It is ready to go. They just need enough orders to tool up the factory and actually build these things. But they've got prototypes that are actually working and I believe Adam is recording his show. No agenda with that. So I just wanted to tell everyone about that. I know I spent about five minutes, maybe six minutes on this. So it's a long time to spend on a very geeky podcaster thing. But I wanted everybody that cares to know about it. So now you know. And I will leave you with that. It's pretty cool stuff, John. I'm excited about. I hope they get enough orders to make this thing a real thing. All right. Moving on. Two hour. We've got a couple of quick tips here, John. A couple of tips. We'll start with a quick tip because that's how we go. If I can find it here, there it is. Dave says, here's a quick tip. At times I receive a PDF from a website with a column of numbers, though there's no way to receive a spreadsheet instead. That would make the number manipulation, of course, way easier. I figured I would be stuck. But that's not true. After channeling my inner John and Dave and my MGG thinking cap, I found a solution. It has some hoops, but they're doable and worth the outcome. So I take the PDF with the column of numbers and I open it in PDF pen from Smile. Then I export that as a Word file, something that PDF pen will let you do. And then once in Word, I copy the column of numbers from Word and paste that into numbers. You could do it Excel too, of course. Or Google spreadsheet, right? That works just fine. Once you copy a column of numbers from Word and paste it into any spreadsheet, boom, you're done. That's it. So thank you for that tip, Dave. That's good stuff. Yeah? Nice. I like that. That's putting on your thinking cap for sure. I like it. Good stuff. Nice work, Dave. Yeah, that's a bit roundabout. Well, but there's no other way. I was trying to, with a lot of programs, including I thought, but maybe not preview, you can select the column of digits, but I can't seem to come across the magic keyboard command. But you know what I'm talking about? A lot of programs, if you hold down either option, command or control, or one of those, often they'll let you select a column of values in which case in theory, you could just copy and paste that column of values. Right. I'm not sure if you can do that in preview. Maybe PDF, or maybe both. I just got to figure out the right. Yeah, figure that out. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't come up with anything immediately. So it could be possible. Copying text out of a PDF gets weird. Yeah, copying text out of lots of things gets weird. Well, we came across a way to do it in Evernote that was very non-intuitive. It was like, well, I tried the copy command in this place, and it didn't work. But if I tried it in this other place, then it does work. Right. We just came up with that the other day. You were like, how did you do that? And I'm like, well, I did it that way. I did it that way. Right. Yeah, we were trying to copy from a PDF inside of an Evernote note. And yeah, using command C with the text highlighted, nothing happened. But you chose to right click or control click on it. That's it. And choose copy and it works. So yeah, I use that all the time. It's great. I love it. All right, cool. Moving on to Andrew. Andrew, in regards to a brief discussion we had in Show 654, he says, in regards to protecting the data on your devices when returning to the US from abroad, I find that regardless of traveling or not, I like to boot from an external drive that has my complete OS and files instead of storing it and booting from the drive on the internal to my computer. This is the reason is this allows me to use whatever Mac I want by simply booting from my external drive, which is, of course, encrypted. The connection is fast enough that wired connection between the external drive and the Mac is fast enough so that there's no lag when booting from the external drive. And I can be discreet since drives have higher capacity, speed with very small footprints. This technique leaves nothing on the main computer and they, meaning customs, can look as hard as they want and find absolutely nothing. As for iOS, that has yet to be determined on what you can do to protect your data. He says, perhaps backing it up before you leave and wiping it out is really the only option. Yeah, so yeah. He says, only adding apps you need while abroad and checking email from your web browser then when you return, you can restore your iOS device back to its US version. That's an interesting workaround, for sure. So yeah, I like the concept of booting from an external drive. And the iOS workaround with the backup that I had when I was in, I was a senior in high school taking physics. And what did we have? Was it the HP 34C? Was that the calculator that was the kind of folded open like a book, John, that you could program? Is that right? I had the 20... Yeah, it was one of the first... It did... Yeah, so I had a dot matrix LCD display. Yeah. And you program it. I remember the reason I liked it is because it could do calculus, which a lot of calculators in the day couldn't do calculus. They could do limited. It couldn't do everything. I mean, it's... Right. So I think it was the 34C. But yeah, I got it because it could do calculus, exactly. And what was cool was... Yeah, maybe it wasn't the 34C. I forget which one. Maybe you were right. Maybe it was the 28C. I don't know. It was whatever one folded open and it really was great because you could do some graphing on it and stuff. I mean, this was 100 years ago or whatever. Yeah, I'm looking. 28C is... It was the 28C. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that was it. Yeah, right. So you can buy one for like 50 bucks on eBay if you want. But it was a cool little calculator. It had this little screen and you could program what I'll call scripts or formulas into it. And you could assign those to soft buttons on the top of the calculator. But the problem for me was that my physics teacher said, yes, you can use the calculator. That's fine. But because part of what you're being tested on when you take tests is memorizing formulas, you have to wipe out all your formulas in your calculator. Because otherwise, that's not... You have an unfair advantage. I'm like, okay, that's cool. I'm totally on board with that. And I actually have a pretty easy time memorizing those sorts of things. So it wasn't that big of a deal. For me, what was a big deal was having to wipe out all my formulas and all my scripts, and then having to reprogram them all because there was no backup functionality. I couldn't plug a USB stick in or a flash memory card and dump them off and then restore them after the test. I thought a lot about this, John. And while I'm not convinced that my physics teacher would agree with my exact solution, I think he would agree with the spirit of it. Because what I did was... So when you program these functions, you would assign them to one of the... I believe there were six soft buttons across the top of the calculator. And so you would assign them to each of those. And you could have six functions on the screen at any point in time. Well, I built a function that reprogrammed what those six buttons said. And they all would say empty to... Or whatever it was that made it look like it was empty and out of the box. And so I had a function called erase all. And it all... It wouldn't erase anything. It would just change the look of the buttons and then I could just back out of that script and it was all there. Now, to be fair, I never used my formulas in the calculator unfairly on a test or anything. This was just to save me the time after the test, having to reprogram all these things back in. And you know, our advice counts, right? Because up until right now, and perhaps not even now, but if Howard Stolzenberg, my physics teacher who I love, is a listener of Matt Geekyab, now he knows. But back then, I don't think he knew. So I succeeded in making sure that I didn't get caught. So there you go. I think they're going to retroactively pull your diploma there. Yeah. Yeah. For such shenanigans. Does that mean I can't be a podcaster anymore if they pull my diploma though? I'm not sure the credentials matter anymore. Right. I remember the shenanigans we love to do was that did you know that you can change on the Apple to that you could change the color of the background to be the same as the text? Oh, I never thought about that. Do you know how difficult it is to use a computer in that state? That'll be my admission. I'm like, Hey, wonder what happens if we do this? Hey, look, you can't use the computer. Well, you had to know what command to type in using touch typing in order to change the color of the text back to something different from the background. He's hilarious. All right. Let's move on here. Okay. You want to take us to Donna instead of instead of causing problems, let's solve a problem. Hey, I solved the problem. I talked about a solution. All right. All right. So Donna has a question. It's a good one. Okay. I want to be sure I understand if I'm on public Wi-Fi, but had to enter a password, my web traffic is encrypted and safe, even if everyone in the hotel, coffee, shop, et cetera, has entered the same password. And the answer is it depends. All right. So we may not have done this last time because we've been talking a lot about the security and the Wi-Fi and all that stuff here. In response to one question, I don't think I was entirely clear. So public Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi where you don't have to enter a password in order to connect to it. That's what you mean. That's what you mean when you say public Wi-Fi. Oh, I think that's what most people say when they mean public Wi-Fi. I'll tell you another way. No, no, no. Because I might feel like I have, there's a coffee shop near us that has publicly available Wi-Fi. It is encrypted with a single password like our home Wi-Fi is. And that password is posted everywhere in the place. And it's public, but, and I think you're going to go here, your traffic is not visible to everyone else sniffing on that network because it's encrypted with the key. Right. And I want to differentiate because the way this question was asked made me think that there is some confusion as to when, what traffic is encrypted and when it's encrypted. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. I'm going to be very clear here on both macOS and iOS, public Wi-Fi is going to be Wi-Fi where you do not see a lock. I want to actually, I don't want to use that term because public means too many things to too many people. All right. Let's call it open Wi-Fi. Let's call it unencrypted Wi-Fi. Passwordless Wi-Fi. Okay. Right. Because that's more specific. We're agreeing on the concept here. I just want to make sure we use the right word. So unencrypted, open. Yeah. Passwordless, I think is probably the most descriptive because anyone using it knows the answer to that. And public may not be the best word because all Wi-Fi is available to the public. I mean, anything that you can see in your list. But I'm going to call the ones without a lock and ones that do not require you to enter a password to get the Wi-Fi as public Wi-Fi. Let's call it, let's not use public again. That's too, yeah. Passwordless. Open unencrypted. Passwordless. Yeah. The thing is, if you're prompted for a password, when you try to connect to it, then the Wi-Fi traffic is encrypted. So when you try to associate, I want to differentiate between what happens, and I think this is where the question is going. Some Wi-Fi you connect to, and then you get a webpage that says, hey, you either got to click on a box in order to confirm, you agree to our terms, or they may ask for a password within the web browser that is not secure. If you enter the password at that point, that's not securing your Wi-Fi traffic. If you try to connect to the access point and you're prompted for a password, that is protecting or encrypting your traffic. Yep. That's right. Yeah. That password that you type in is actually the encryption key or part of the encryption key that's used. And that does random number generation. Right. But the answer is yes. If you're all entering, when you attempt to connect to the thing, if you're all entering the same password, you're not, the bottom line is the same encryption key is not being generated for all of you. There's additional stuff happening, and we're not going to go into much detail. Now, it would have been really nice when Wi-Fi was conceived if an encryption key would have been negotiated regardless of whether or not the Wi-Fi connection itself was password protected. I understand why that wasn't the case, because you didn't know what encryption protocols any given Wi-Fi client might or might not be able to support. And we saw a lot of that as things evolved from no encryption to WEP to WPA to WPA2. Sometimes you'd get like a piece of hardware. There were a lot of Windows machines I dealt with that could not do WPA encryption. They could only do WEP. And that was just, I mean, that's just the way that Wi-Fi chip was built. So I get why this didn't happen, and it probably would have been some WEP type key anyway, and it would have been insecure. But yeah. So if there's no password when you associate with the Wi-Fi network, then that means the data being sent over Wi-Fi is not encrypted in the Wi-Fi transmission. It might be encrypted if you're connecting SSL or something other than that. And that's the other point I want to get to. And what's the important thing here? If you see a lock, so just like if you connect to a Wi-Fi access point and in the list on your device, you see a lock next to it. That means that once you give it the, if you connect within a browser, you're also going to see a lock. If that's a different level of encryption. So then this gets interesting. So what if you connect to a Wi-Fi that doesn't ask for a password and then you're surfing to a site that uses, as you said, Dave, and you see the lock in the browser, that traffic, that is being encrypted between you and the server. Now it's probably best to have both. So if you connect to a Wi-Fi access point and you enter a password, that's encrypted. And then if you're surfing or using another app, almost every app that's worth its salt, ha, yeah, only the crypto people will get why I said salt. But any client worth its salt is going to be using SSL or TLS to encrypt the web traffic. Right. It's just to clarify because I think... No, that's good. Just to crystallize the definition because I can understand the confusion and it comes into when you're supplying this password is when there may be confusion as to what exactly is being encrypted. Now, encryption aside, Andy in the chat room points out that it is possible and many corporate Wi-Fi networks that don't have passwords employ a different type of security. It's not encryption because it can't be, but it is isolation, meaning that the only traffic you can see on your network or only traffic any client can see on the network is the traffic to and from that client. He does point out, though, that most coffee shops and things at that level don't employ that type of enterprise grade Wi-Fi solution. So chances are, you're not seeing it, but he says he stated a hotel in Boston that happened to have it. But Andy's a network geek, so he looks and notices this stuff and... Yeah. Yeah. Now, if you'd like to find out, you could run a piece of software like Wireshark or similar, which is a protocol analyzer or packet sniffer. We'll put that in more common terminology. Hey, bring it to your coffee shop and do what you normally do and then see what you see. You may see some interesting stuff. Probably will. Yeah. Well, hopefully most of it, like even with Wireshark, the last time I did this, I think at my library, which doesn't have password-protected Wi-Fi, so see everything. I saw some stuff. I also saw a lot of stuff that it said, oh, well, this is using SSL. And then here's a packet of Goobbley Cook. What do you think of that? Sure. And I'm like, I don't know because it's encrypted. Yeah, yeah. Cool. All right. I want to actually, I want to talk about our sponsor, which is Blue Apron at blueapron.com slash MGG. That's where you can go to get the first three meals for free on your first order. And it's all free shipping. What they do is you go and you pick out food. Now, the recipes change every week and you can either pick out food for a two-person household, a four-person household. You can adjust those things. And the recipes are actually different. We've always done four-person household stuff because there's four people here. But while Lisa and Lucas were in China, Skyler and I ratcheted it down to the two-person plan. And so this week, we can pick, let's see, we can pick between roasted pork and mustard pan sauce, tandoori-style chicken and rice, Nashville-style hot catfish, stir-fried wonton noodles, or a Fragola Sarta pasta salad. These are things that you can make at home. And I guarantee that you can make them. They send you the ingredients and a perfect one-sheet how-to that has some pictures and diagrams and all of that stuff. It makes it really easy and fun because everybody gets to participate. So you look at this thing and you say, all right, let's chop up the work and you go do this. I'll do that. You do this. I'll do that. And then within usually about 30 minutes, give or take, some of the stuff actually comes together even faster than that. You're eating this meal that you've prepared based on all these fresh ingredients that Blue Apron sends you. So you got to go check it out. Go to blueapron.com.mgg and try it out. You get your first or three meals for free on your first order there. And the meals are all kind of in at about 10 bucks ahead. So it's not, it's really not, it's inexpensive by my standards. Guy and I were just at the grocery store yesterday buying some other stuff and I was like, oh yeah, this is, that Blue Apron is a pretty good deal. So go check it out. Blueapron.com.mgg. Our thanks to Blue Apron for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's talk to Steven here because this is actually one of my favorite things to do and I don't know how long it's been since we've talked about this on the show. Steven says, I love the show and trust your advice so much that three months ago I trashed my old routers and bought four Eros to cover my house. Easy setup and works great for most of my devices. My setup is complicated though. I have the Eros in bridge mode behind my AT&T U-verse router as suggested by Ero. My wife's iPhone 7 is the lone problem. It's the only device that will connect and work for a few minutes and then lose its internet access. It is still showing that it is connected to Wi-Fi and the Ero app shows it as a connected device but nothing will load. I've talked with Ero support and they say turning Wi-Fi off and back on does not work. Ero support says that there's some Apple issue with handoff but I can restart the U-verse router and her phone will work again for a few minutes and then it quits. He says, I have an iPhone 7 Plus and another iPhone 7. Both of those have no issues, just my wife's. You can imagine how this goes over when the wife can't get to the internet. Any thoughts? Yeah, I don't think this is a problem with the Ero and the reason is exactly what you said. Changing nothing with the phone or with the Ero but restarting the U-verse router magically solves this for her. I think this is a DHCP slash routing issue, not a Wi-Fi handoff issue and I've seen things like this. While we're restarting the U-verse router to temporarily solve it, I think certainly the first place I would start is on your iPhone. Go to settings, general, reset, reset network settings. This is going to wipe out all of the Wi-Fi networks on your iPhone and all of the VPNs that you have configured. Just fair warning, there's a little bit of reconfiguration to do. Now if you have your Wi-Fi network synced over via iCloud, which sort of happens automatically, that most of those will probably come back just fine. Your VPNs you're going to have to set up again by yourself. But what this does is it clears out all of the weird routing and custom DNS and all of that other stuff that might have gotten baked in. I call it behind the UI. Things you literally can't see or touch but are right there causing you problems and reset network settings. I wind up doing it on any of our iOS devices in the house probably once a year and invariably it solves these kinds of weird network problems that you just scratch your head and you're like, crap. It's great that Apple at least offers us this level of granularity. Of course, I'd love to go much deeper and be able to see what the problems are, but being able to do this without wiping the entire phone is quite handy. It's pretty painless other than resetting your VPN or whatever, typing in your Wi-Fi password one more time. It's really not that big of a deal. I highly recommend doing this, Steven. I think and hope that this will work for you. Thoughts on this, John? Me too. Okay. I didn't even know that was there. It's good to know. I don't think I've ever had an iOS-only network event in quite some time. What triggers me to suggest this is when it's like, hey, every other device that I have, including all my iOS devices, are working fine in this scenario, but I have this one that inexplicably doesn't. It's like, yep, reset network settings. That's, you know, go there. Let's at least start with that because it takes all of about 30 seconds and then you'll know. All right. While we're on the concept of Wi-Fi and all of that, let's go to Ken. Ken asks, he says, well, when I ran Apple's wireless diagnostics by selecting scan, he says, I saw a list. He said the top on the list is my 2.4 gigahertz network from my time capsule. And then later further down the list, I see the 5 gigahertz network from the same thing. He says, I didn't set a separate name for my 5 gigahertz. He says, but my iMac running 10.12.4 with 802.11 AC Wi-Fi sometimes switches from 5 gigahertz to 2.4 gigahertz. And when it is on 2.4, I get slower download speeds. He says, I'm surprised that my 2.4 gigahertz doesn't use 802.11 AC. So I'm thinking that's why I get low download speeds from 2.4. Is there a way to set my 2.4 gigahertz to use 802.11 AC so I can get better download speeds when I switch to 2.4? And the answer is no. 2.4 gigahertz connections, the fastest protocol that you have available on those is 802.11 N. 802.11 N goes at a max of 150 megabits per second per stream, and you might have multiple streams so it might get faster. And 802.11 AC goes 433 megabits per second per stream. Now, really the answer is you want to make sure your iMac stays on that 5 gigahertz connection because even if you, let's say you have a full speed 2.4 and a half speed because it doesn't go as far, half speed 5 gigahertz connection, well full speed 2.4 again, let's say it's 150 megabits per second. A half speed 5 gigahertz 802.11 AC connection is going to be 215, really 216.5 as your maximum speed at half. That's still better. Half speed 5 gigahertz is still better than full speed 2.4. The problem is your Mac generally chooses a network based on its signal strength. So without help from the router to steer it using band steering to another band sometimes, letting your Mac choose isn't the right thing. So with that in mind, we're going to walk back a little bit of advice for you. Generally our advice is set your SSIDs to be the same Wi-Fi SSID for 2.4. This is your network name. 2.4 gigahertz, 5 gigahertz, set it to the same thing, let the clients decide it's easier. Easier isn't always the best and in your case, it's not. So for you, I would break that and say, name one of your networks, Ken's 2.4 and the other Ken's 5 and prioritize that 5 by going in to system preferences, network, Wi-Fi. I think we go to airport, whatever that thing is where we get the list and put the 5 gigahertz network at the top of the list and have it forced to choose that one. You'll probably be better off. In your scenario, because you know that 5 gigahertz, it gives you better speeds than 2.4, all else being factored in for you, that's the right answer. And for some of the rest of you, that might be the right answer too. My general advice still sticks, leave it the same, set it and forget it, don't worry about it. But if you find yourself in a scenario like Ken, breaking that can absolutely be the best thing for you. Thoughts on that, Joe? I guess sometimes it does get it wrong. What you can do, and I think our listener hinted at this, so yeah, so you can hold down the alt key and see some of the, some of what's behind why the computer may have switched. Now, you're going to see some figures here, and I say probably the most relevant here. We're talking about hitting the alt key and clicking on the airport menu in the menu bar. That was just the part you missed. Now you can continue. Yeah. Yeah. Now you can do that, or you can run something that we like called the Boogie Tools, which we'll show you this in a condensed format. But the numbers that you want to look at to see why it may have done that, there's a couple here. There's the transmit rate, and also an MCS index, and basically the higher the MCS index, the better speeds you should be getting. Or it tells you the negotiated transmit rate, which the Boogie Tools tells you that as well. Sure. It could be that it's making the choice because it thinks you're going to get more speed, or it could just be, as you're saying, making the wrong choice, and that it sees a stronger signal and assumes, hey, that's better. Right. Sometimes it's not. Right. Yeah. It doesn't always get it right. It can't. Part of the reason might be, it might negotiate a faster speed with your 2.4 GHz network, but if your 2.4 GHz network is congested, then your actual speed will be a lot less than whatever you've negotiated, because it's sharing that bandwidth amongst all your Wi-Fi clients. And your computer has literally no way of knowing that. Right. It's up to the router, and that's why we like routers that employ what's called band steering or smart connector, that sort of thing, where it actually says, I know you're over here, but trust me on this, go over there. It's going to be better for you. I've got people pumping tons of data over here. It's going to be a bad experience. So that's why some of these routers that have smarts in them can be helpful. But you can employ these smarts on your own if you, like I said, in Ken's scenario, he knows 2.4 bad for that computer at that spot. Five good. Great. Well, okay. Now you know more than your network can tell itself. So go ahead, make the change. There you go. That's my thought. And yeah, Debuki tools is cool. It's handy. I like it. And it's free in the Mac App Store. So you got to go get it. We'll put a link in the show notes. Yeah, yeah, I'll see something happen sometimes. And it makes me wonder, especially with the Eero, I'll see it using to do the tools and be like, Hey, I kicked you from a five gig to 2.4 gig. And I'm like, hmm, I can do that. Yeah. It could be that I'm in an edge case. And it's like, Oh, well, you're close enough where it makes sense to. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. And I'm not sure I believe them, but I do. But the well, here's what the CEO of Eero told me that they don't employ any band steering or mesh steering, except my experience and testing with Eero gives me very different answers to that question. I am. I was until they told me they don't employ any of it. I was certain that they did. So I don't know what they're doing that makes it happen. Skynet. Yeah, exactly. But Eero does does it one of the best. It really, I would put in terms of the band steering and then, of course, mesh steering, which the Synology doesn't do, but in terms of band steering and smart connect, Eero and the the Synology routers are like top of the class, even though Eero tells me they don't do any of it. So I don't even know what to say about that. But I figured I'd be just be I'd come clean on this that, in fact, Eero doesn't have it according to them. All right. Let's talk with Ed. Ed, because Ed's got good questions. It's always good. He says, I have spectrum internet used to be Time Warner with 200 megabits per second down. I have two questions. First, I want to stop paying 10 bucks a month to rent my cable modem and buy one. But I want to future proof myself. How many downstream channels would I need? Is eight enough? Or do I need 16 or perhaps 32? Or is that not a consideration? Question number two, and we'll answer them together, is how do I measure my peak instantaneous bandwidth over a period of time? I have my 200 megabits per second plan. But am I even using that much? The ISP website just shows me how many gigabytes a month I've consumed, which is in about the 300 gig per month range. But that gives me no indication of bandwidth. I want to know if my 200 megabit plan can be dropped to, say, 100 megabits per second. And I could realize the substantial savings. Is there any software that can track bandwidth consumption at the modem versus time? So for the first question, regarding how many downstream channels to get in your DOCSIS 3 cable modem, I would go with at least 16. There's a chart on Wikipedia that will help you decide what to do. But in short, 16 channels in the US gets you 686 megabits per second down. Now this is maximum throughput. Obviously, if you're on a plan that limits you to 200, guess what? You're going to get 200. But your modem would be capable of 686. 686. 24 down gets you just over a gigabit of potential throughput. Eight downstream channels gets you 343. But here's the thing. As we've found, it's good to have headroom. Comcast will currently sync up to 20 downstream channels regardless of your provision speed. So even if you pay for just 50 megabits down, if you've got a modem that'll do 24, it will sync 20 of those and leave 4 alone. Where this becomes very handy is if you're in a congested area. By utilizing more channels, you have more headroom to get the bandwidth that you're paying for from your ISP. And this is a real thing. So my advice? Get at least 16 channels down. And you should be okay for a while. DOCSIS 3.1 is coming. Comcast is testing it in a few markets. You can't really buy a DOCSIS 3.1 modem right now. At least not at any price point that would make any sense whatsoever. My guess is even if you were to move to DOCS 3.1 in a year, it would be cheaper to buy a new modem now, a DOCSIS 3.0, and then in a year, buy another new modem as opposed to buying a DOCSIS 3.1 now. They're just totally cost prohibitive. So just don't think about it. But unless you're in a market where you can use it immediately and then you can't buy it, they'll just rent it to you. So there you go. Any thoughts on that before we get to question number two, John? One useful thing. So I was asking myself, gee, I wonder how many downstream and upstream channels I have. Dave, one way to find this out, if the people that give you your modem choose to allow it, is you can go to this handy IP address in your browser. And the IP address is 192.168.100.1. When I go there, Dave, my Ares 822M informs me that I have eight downstream and four upstream channels, which for the package that I have is plenty. And also I don't pay a monthly rental fee. It's part of the package. So for me, this is fine because I'm not going to, with the package that I have, I'm not going to exceed these limits here. And at some point in the future, I just go to them and say, hey, I want the latest, shiny. And they'll be like, yep, here you go. So that IP address is important because you can see a lot of, you may see nothing. It may say, yeah, your ISP doesn't want you to see this. Most ISPs let you do that though. There are a few now that block that, but they can block it. Even if you own the modem, your ISP can block you from getting to that screen. Well, because it's their profile that's going to get loaded on there when you attach it to your account with the system. But the other way to do it is to just, like John said, look up the model number of your cable modem and just plug it in. Amazon will tell you, they want to sell you that same model. So they'll say, hey, this is an eight by four cable modem, or this is a 16 by eight cable modem, 16 first number downstream channels, second number eight in that example, upstream channels. Good to go. So yep, it's good stuff. All right. Now, as to your second question to see what type of, how much band width you're using, not, or how much throughput you're using, I don't know what's the right term here, John. So we want to see a snapshot like a histogram over time to see how much data we were pushing at any point in time to see if we really need 200 megabits per second for Ed here, or if 100 would be okay. The only way that I know to do that, but I'm sure there are others, is a piece of software called multi router traffic grapher at MRTG is what we all call it. And I'll put a link in the show notes to MRTG. But there's got to be other things that do this. And what MRTG does is it pulls your router with a protocol called SNMP. And generally you have it pull it every five minutes. And it asks the router how it also all sorts of questions. And one of them is how much bandwidth are you utilizing at this very moment snapshot in time. And by getting that data every five minutes over the course of, you know, day, days, week, months, you start to see, ah, really, I'm never going above, you know, like my peaks might, your, your peaks are always going to be the maximum because when you go to download something, that's what happens. But if you're not really pushing that and you're okay with short term downloads taking twice as long, then you're fine. So, so, but there's got to be a, there's got to be something else. Andy in the chat room says he uses dark stats on his PF sense router. That's also a geeky solution. That's, I have no problem with geeky solution, but, yeah, I'm just curious what, what else exists out there? Do you know of anything, John, to get this data? Well, there's one thing. So it depends on if your router supports SNMP. Right. Sadly, it looks like the Eero does not, which makes me sad, but there is a utility that I found in the app store and I've used in other cases. And it's called SNMP test utility. And will that do history of this? It looks like kind of. I mean, I see a little, little barge. I mean, it's not running for me now because the Eero doesn't, doesn't want to talk to it. But yeah, it looks like it shows, yeah, bandwidth usage. It's a number that's recorded by a lot of devices. So I think if you keep, you may only be able to get a snapshot. But the thing is that usually if the device is collecting this, it's, you know, it's going to keep increasing. So you could say, okay, well, I took a snapshot now and then I took another snapshot. And oh, that's how much bandwidth I'm using. Or like I said, your ISP sometimes shows you that too. Oddly enough, they'll show me, if I go to them, they'll show me how much of my optimum Wi-Fi that I've used per month, but they don't show me initially how much actual data I've consumed per month because they don't care. So I think MRTG is the answer, but your router has to support SNMP and you need to run MRTG on one of your Macs or whatever. And it'll just build these charts. I used it for years. All right, fun stuff, fun, fun stuff. Where are we here? All right, we have time for a couple more. Do you have a favorite one of this pile that's left here, John? Yeah, let's look here. All right, well, we're going to do Stephen and you can pick a favorite while I read Stephen and then we'll answer Stephen and we'll do the other one, hopefully, and then we'll go from there. Stephen writes, we got a new Mac mini. I ran migration assistant to bring stuff over from the old Mac. I'd already set up the new Mac and didn't run migration assistant at first. So when I ran it, it brought the old username in and put it alongside everything that I had already configured. My question is, what's the best way to get that information from the old username over to the new username? Or am I better off to delete the new username and rename the old one? Thank you for any suggestions. Yeah. So this does get a little convoluted. Where it gets weird is in terms of permissions level stuff when you start migrating this in and then, of course, deciding what settings to keep, the best solution if you're going to do migration assistant for an account is to do it at first. And I realize you probably know that now. The question is, what have you done on this machine with the newly created user account that you can't afford to lose? And it might be better to move all that data into the old user account that you've migrated over and then kill off the new one. But you've got to make sure you do a user level permissions repair to make that right. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, John, but I think Onyx is back to doing user level permissions repair, right? Somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. It gets a little convoluted, but you need to do a user level permissions repair once you move that data in. Otherwise, it's not going to be happy. But any thoughts on this, John? Hmm. Mr. Braun. Now, if I had bad things happen when I've tried to use that tool multiple times. Which tool? Well, migration assistant. Oh, okay. What problems? Well, falling into the same situation. Okay. I have two things that are kind of, but not entirely dissimilar. Is that the right wording? That's close enough. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I agree. It gets rough. I love it, but only use it once. Using it multiple times is, yeah. Yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. No, the advice is definitely, you know, do it when creating the machine and don't create another account first. But when you find yourself in this situation, you can move things around where it starts to get weird. I mean, moving documents over and that sort of thing. Okay, that's fine. It's doable. Where it gets weird is moving things inside the library folder. Preferences, mail. Mail is almost impossible to merge this way. The good news is most of our mail servers are IMAP mail servers. So if you, as long as you don't have offline on my Mac is what Apple calls it, mail storage for both accounts, I would pick the one that you do have the offline or on my Mac storage and then just launch mail on that with that account up and running and let it sync all of your IMAP mail. And then you should be good. Mail is stored in mail. All of your mail data is stored in the library slash the home library mail folder. But, you know, iTunes libraries, you would, you know, you're going to need to merge those. But again, if you're using Apple Music, then that might just merge it all together for you. Photos libraries, if you've started to create a new one, you've got to use something like Power Photos to merge all those together. It starts to get very, very ugly. And there's no one size fits all answer. I mean, we're sort of throwing things at the wall here. But we don't know what we don't know, right? We don't know for you, Steven, what exactly you've created in this new user account. And if it's very, very little and you can afford to just nuke it, that's the right thing. And nuking it can can take on one of two forms. It could be nuke the entire machine and then just repull your migration assistant as you build your system again. Or nuking it could just be delete, you know, log in to the migrated user account, go into system preferences, users and groups, and blow away the one you had created in that OS install and then just live with with the new one. But again, I don't know what data you have in either place that's irreplaceable. I mean, that's the hard part. So it gets a little grant, you need to get a little granular with it. So it gets a little nuts. Thoughts on that, John? Anything? Crazy. Okay. It's nuts. It's nuts. All right. Do you have one? We're like almost out of time, but if we can do it quickly. I think it's a good one here. So I was going to do, but we could do, we've got, well, Bob is quick and dirty. Yeah, Bob's good. The Sander one that I think you wanted to go for, there's, there's several questions sort of linked together there. So that's why I would steer with that. Okay. It's like an onion. Yeah. All right. So let's go to Bob. This is a good way to wrap things up. All right. And Bob says, first let me say, unfortunately, I'm not a geek. Well, we'll help you with that. Geeks in training folks. That's what we all are here. Get. Get. That's right. Get. I was having major issues likely caused by me. No, no, don't assume that. Well, hold on. That resulted in me reinstalling OS Mac OS Sierra 10.12.4 and a mid 2011 27 inch or I assume an iMac, better be an iMac. Having to do this was a chore for me, but I was amazed at how much faster it was running after starting fresh. That's usually the case. However, I'm confused with what's going on with launchpad. Mac applications shows all of the files are displayed in launchpad. The thing is, this isn't all of my apps. Somehow a few of my apps that seem to run fine can be found here. Mac user slash me slash desktop slash applications. How do I get all my apps into the launchpad where they belong? That's a good question. One, all your apps should be in one place. But yeah, sometimes apps go off the beaten path and we'll put it in a different directory. I don't know why. Right. Well, sometimes it makes sense for an app that's available to all users that will put it in a different place other than let's just say some apps want to put the apps in a place that doesn't make any sense. Here's how you get around this, Dave. I just intuitively knew this. That's good. That's why we do what we do. So I actually on one of my machines have apps that are in a similar non-standard location. Here's what I did, Dave. I clicked on it. I right clicked on it. I said create alias. Okay. If I did an alias, I then drag that over to where all the other apps are, started up launchpad, and it's like, oh, here you go. Okay. So by putting an app in your main applications folder and not your home, you know, not some sub folder or whatever, by putting it in your main applications folder, launchpad just automatically notices it. Oh, that's cool. I didn't realize that. It was smart enough. I didn't even change the name of it. It was an app. I think it was like an old version of iOS console, which are some of these ones there. Sure. And I created the alias, dragged it over. Didn't even change the name of the alias. And when it showed up in launchpad and I clicked on it, it launched that app. So that's awesome. That's how you consolidate everything. And making an alias can solve many problems where a file should be in one place, but you'd like it to be seen from another. Yeah. Huh. Very cool, man. That's good. I like it. Yeah. I would argue though, instead of making the alias, ask why you're keeping the app outside of the main applications folder. And if you can quickly answer that, and you know exactly why you don't want it there, then, then absolutely keep it where it is. But if you say, well, I don't know, move it into the applications folder, chances are that's going to be a much better place for it, for, you know, automatic updates and just certain, just consolidating and keeping your system predictable. So that's, that's my feeling. I mean, I keep like, we use a different version of Skype to do this show. And so I have, I have that compartmentalized in my user application folder so that it doesn't impact Lisa when she's using Skype on this machine, which she just runs from the regular apps folder, you know, that kind of thing. But you have to ask yourself, why is that app, why is that app there to begin with? Why did I ask the developer? Ask the author? Yeah. Well, the author might not have put it in this alternate place. Right. I mean, I think in his case, it's because he moved things around and just kept some apps with him. And now they're in this sort of non-standard folder. All right. I want to, so this week was a little crazy because of my travel schedule. And then with Lisa being gone, I've always appreciated and been well aware of everything she does around the house. But this week I got to viscerally experience all the effort that she puts in. And so my schedule was nuts. And that meant that up until, I don't know, maybe 12 hours ago, the show wasn't prepared. And so we didn't get through all the questions this week, but we did get through all of your premium questions. And most of the folks in this show who had things mentioned or questions answered were our premium listeners simply because we prioritize that stuff. Don't worry the rest of you. I will get to all of that this week. We don't really let that stuff linger. But the premium folks, because they help us keep the lights on with direct support come first in line when we're answering questions. And I want to shout out as we have been doing to all of the premium folks who made contributions this week, either one-time contributions or just on your automatic schedule. So on the 25 bucks every six months schedule, we had and want to thank Robert R, Kenneth C, Chuck J, Edward I, Anthony C, Stevie D, and James H. Thank you so much to all of you, you rock. On the 10 bucks a month schedule this week, the people that that cycled around were Michael P, Chris F, and Elizabeth B. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You are awesome. And we had a few, quite a few actually one-time contributions this week. We had John B for 100 bucks. Thank you, John B. And then Jeff T, Bob S, and Michelle H each for five. So thank you to all of you. You folks rock. Of course, I want to thank our sponsors, which is Blue Apron. All right, blueapron.com.mgg. That's good stuff. John, we want everybody, of course, the premium folks can email us at premium at macgeekab.com. Everybody else gets to use the feedback at macgeekab.com. And we do see everything and we will get to answering everything. So it all works out. I did. I said, feedback at macgeekab.com. Or you can call us 224888geek, which a geek is, John? 4335. That it is. You can find us on Facebook. If you go to macgeekab.com slash Facebook, we have a stellar group of people there answering each other's questions and really helping out, including answering some of ours. So it's great stuff. Again, I want to thank CacheFly as always, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com for providing all the bandwidth. And then the sponsors in our podcast marketplace include Fat Cat Software at FatCatSoftware.com slash MGG, Smile at SmileSoftware.com slash Geek, OtherworldComputing at MaxSales.com, and Barebones Software at Barebones.com. Folks, have a great week. John, have a great combined birthday celebration today, and all of you, please, please, please make sure that you