 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab Episode 880 for Monday, July 12th, 2021. Welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We take all of that stuff. We mash it together, try to string it into an agenda that we loosely follow. The point being, the goal being that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include ladderlife.com slash mgg amazon.com slash mggrx for Amazon Pharmacy. Of course, ladder life insurance on the on the on the prior one. And then linodelinode.com slash mgg where you get $100 in free credit just for being a Mac Geekab listener to get started. We'll talk more in depth about each of those a little bit later here for now, as usual here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. I think John's John was muted, that's right. And here in flood prone, Fearfield, Connecticut. This is John Afron. You're not really flood prone from how man, easy for you to say. You're not really flood prone. Are you? I mean, I realize I got a weather alert. Sure. But you don't get those all the time, right? Like, that's not a routine error. OK, good. All right, that's good. I didn't want to worry about you. Yeah. I mean, I like if we're supposed to worry about you, then yes, wanted to just wanted to know I wanted to calibrate. So we'll worry about you today. Hopefully things pass. This is a hurricane Emma that we're seeing. Do I have the name right in my head? I think that's right. Yeah. All right, because we record this on on Friday. So we're recording this on the Friday the 9th before the 12th. All right, I am eager to get to our quick tips, John, because Ben has one that solves a longstanding problem that I've had. And Ben says, on a couple of occasions, including this past week's show, you commented that do not disturb is permanent in Big Sur. When you option click the clock to turn it on in prior OSes, it was not permanent. It was semi-permanent. It would last for 24 hours and then turn itself off. That's not the case in Big Sur. And so I found myself and Ben's right, you know, with it on for days. He says, however, if you have do not disturb scheduled during certain hours, this will cause it to expire at the end of the next scheduled period. For example, Ben says, I have D&D scheduled for 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. So if I option click the clock, do not disturb gets enabled immediately, but only until the next occurrence of 7 a.m., at which point it gets disabled. And this is he's totally right. And this follows the same sort of logical flow that you get in iOS and iPad OS would do not disturb. So I get why Apple did this. I wish they had, I don't know, I wish they'd communicated. But that's why we do this show, right? So we can learn these things. But you do this in system preferences notifications. Do not disturb is the first thing at the top of that list. And you can, of course, have it turn on, do not disturb. Now, I don't necessarily want do not disturb on in the middle of the night if I'm here working or tracking things in the studio or whatever. So I don't want it on from 11 to 7. But I took this and made one more step. I set it to turn on at 6.59 a.m. and turn off at 7 a.m. So it really is never on automatically, but it then also turns itself off. You can't have it turn off automatically without turning it on. So you have to set it on time. But if you want to do that to just one minute, it works great. So finally, I can have do not disturb. It's weird. I don't know why I didn't think about this earlier this week. I was thinking about this problem, I guess, because it came up in last week's show, John, and I was thinking, I wonder if there's a way with keyboard maestro that I could script it to, you know, at 7 a.m. every day, turn off, do not disturb. And now I think I've I've found a better solution because it's baked into the US, even though I have to have it on for a full minute. I think I'll I think I'll live. So thank you for that, Ben. That's super helpful. That's the beauty of these quick tips. Like, I feel like I've learned all five things already. I haven't though. So I got it. We got to stick with it. You can't. No, we can't bail. I haven't actually learned five things. Only only the one. You want to take us to the next one, John? See if we can get to those five. All right. So we got one from David here. He founded article from our friends over at Mac rumors. Apple in iOS 15 is adding new separation alerts to the Find My app, which will let you know if you leave an Apple device, devices attached to an AirTag or a Find My Enable third party device behind. OK, that's cool. It is cool. I that I like that. That's pretty good, man. What a nice thing to know. I've also noticed with the with my AirTags, they've the firmware is newer. Oh, interesting. Just magically updated. Yeah, I was surprised. You know, I went, you know, in the Find My app. And then if you go to, you know, the screen for the device and yeah, and tap on it, it gives you the serial number in the firmware version. And I just noticed that it had updated at some point on all of mine. So interesting. Huh. All right. Well, cool. I mean, that's that's great. Cool. I like that. Sneaky. No, those separation alerts. I've always wanted my tile to do that and it never would. Even if I paid for the whatever tile Super Hoopti Pro subscription, it wouldn't do that because I want to know, did I leave my backpack not at home, but like, did I get separated from it? That's an important thing. So yeah, I like that. It's good. Yeah, I actually tried the, I think you can say that something is lost and I tried that, but it didn't work. Huh. Get it. Well, was it tried again? Yeah, try it. Yeah. Let us know. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. All right. Cool. You want to keep a roll takes to Jeremy. Yep. Jeremy's got one here. I was just trying to print a site in Safari and saw that part of it was getting cut off. This appeared to be happening. Whether I did an actual print or just printed to PDF, not what I wanted to happen, but then I thought about reader view while that isn't available for all sites. It was available for the site that I wanted and resulted in the page being able to get printed without cutting anything off as a bonus reader view didn't get rid of any of the infographics on this site. Nice. Yes. So that's a good tip. I run into that every now and then too is that, well, why are you rendering it wrong? You know, when you see the preview before you print something. Yeah, there is like a print view that that as a web designer you can set and it can be remarkably different from what the, you know, the displayed view is I've I know there is a way to anybody of all the third party apps. So maybe somebody needs to tell us, well, even if it doesn't, I don't know it. So feedback at mackeycap.com. But I know there's a way to say print a PDF of this web page as the web page appears in my window. And I would love to relearn how to do that because I've clearly forgotten over the years. Okay, and a bonus tip to throw in the ring here. Yes, it's true. You will not always get the reader view option in the menu bar or I guess the URL bar. Is that what we call it now? Yeah, yeah. But you can as far as go to view show reader and force it to. Does that does that work even on sites that that very specifically block having a reader view? I have to try that. I'll have to try it a few more times, but yeah. Oh, cool. Cool. But yeah, let us know. I want to know how to save a PDF of what a web page looks like. So feedback at mackeycap.com. We'd love to hear. Oh, yeah. I think you're right. Feedback at mackeycap.com. That's it, my friend. That is it. All right. One more quick tip while we're on the Safari thing. Listener Terry says, have you ever had the situation where you enter a single character in the address bar of Safari and you expect it to load the website you want and just hit return but end up someplace entirely different. For example, maybe you hit F and then return thinking you're going to Facebook and yet you end up at Fishing Guides Canada or some such nonsense from last month's vacation. There is a way to clear out just a single website from your browser history to avoid this. Terry goes on open Safari, click command Y, review the list of sites find the offender, right click to open the contextual menu, select delete and then that should do it. He says on iOS swipe left to delete. So there you go. He says now that annoying site you didn't want to go to will not auto fill when you type its first character. You are welcome. Thank you, Terry. Absolutely. That's a great one. I like that. That's good. Swipe left to delete. I like it. That's good. All right. All right. Let's do some questions, shall we? Sure. So Allison has a question. Maybe Allison at potfeed.com. Does a Mac podcast? I've heard of this podcast. Yeah. No, she does a great job over there. She says on Mac OS Big Sur, my spotlight index is getting corrupted, then sorts itself out and then it corrupts again. I use it primarily as an application launcher and some days it has no trouble finding apps in the next instead it just shows me web searches for the same text string. On the days it works, it usually says indexing with the progress bar when I make a successful search. I know the trick about how I can put my entire drive inside system preferences, spotlight, privacy, close and then take it out again. This causes the re-indexing and for a day or two it will work and then it gets messed up again. I have other app launchers but I like spotlight. Any idea what I can do? The one suggestion I have, so yes, dragging something in privacy and then out again is one way. But you may want to try some command line magic. I think that does a more thorough re-indexing. You do that by going into the terminal and typing sudo mdutil-e and then a slash. That will rebuild all spotlight data on everything. We'll put that in the show notes so you can just copy and paste from the show notes and be safe. The other thing is if you're using spotlight mostly for an app launcher, you could. This is my suggestion. System preferences, spotlight, search results. Maybe just choose applications as the only option there. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah. We had a quick tip last week, maybe a week before, about using launcher as your application launcher, which I forget the name of whichever review it was who sent that in, but you can map command space bar to fire up launcher and then do it that way. That would be another way because that's only applications there so that might do it. As I understood, I agree with you wholeheartedly. The way it was explained to me years ago was that by putting it into privacy and taking it out, that does cause a re-indexing, but it leaves the database intact. So if there is some corruption in the database or the indexes for the database, that won't necessarily get cleared out. Whereas if you use mdutil-e, that literally erases the spotlight index files and forces a rebuild. It's a little more, you know, it's the shotgun approach, but if you truly want to blow away those indexes and force them to be rebuilt, it's not so bad. And on SSDs these days, indexes tend to get rebuilt pretty efficiently and don't crush your operating system performance while they're doing it, usually. Cool. More on that or are we good to go to Bill? I think we're good. Alright, Bill says, I need some clarification about the consequences of resetting network settings on my iPhone. I recently had to reset network settings on my 12 Pro running 14.6 while troubleshooting with Apple some cell phone data problems. While I knew that the immediate impact would be to lose all my Wi-Fi passwords, I thought that they would repopulate over time as they synced back down from iCloud. As my iCloud account generally shares passwords between all my devices. In fact, I think you mentioned something like this in a recent episode. However, that has not been my experience. I lost all of my Wi-Fi passwords not only on my iPhone, but also on my iPad. Nothing restored from iCloud. However, both my iMac and my MacBook Pro retained their Wi-Fi settings. They never lost their connection and I can see many networks, including those now gone from my two iOS devices in network preferences. The iPhone user guide does say that all network settings are removed in addition the device name assigned in settings general about is reset to iPhone and manually trusted certificates such as for websites are changed to untrusted. I was unaware of the phone's name being wiped out but he says I noticed it by chance when going in to connect to a hotspot. I have since renamed my phone. Bottom line, what's the scoop? What did iOS devices? Why did iOS devices lose Wi-Fi settings but macOS devices did not? When should iCloud repopulate my Wi-Fi information if ever? I says I'll be re-entering Wi-Fi passwords at family and friends houses all over the country for the foreseeable future. That's frustrating. I can't say that my experience has been exactly different from yours. We went over to for the 4th of July, we were over in Maine and my uncle's Wi-Fi is actually both of my uncle's Wi-Fi might have lots of family that lives right in the same area. It's actually kind of awesome. It's a long story that started with my great-grandfather deciding that he wanted family to have a place to get together and somehow magically like made that lesson infused that lesson in the family all the way down. Two of my three uncles' houses and Wi-Fi networks, aunts and uncles' houses have... I set up their Wi-Fi and so the passwords definitely haven't changed but I had nothing in my phone. I did have it in my Mac though and I have done a reset network settings to solve that battery use issue that I did a while back but I'm sure I've done several. It's been a couple of years since I've been there. I don't know if you've heard about this pandemic thing that kept us from visiting people. So it's... Yeah, I've experienced the same thing and I'm not entirely happy about it. I just figured maybe... Yeah, I don't know what I figured while I was up there. I really wasn't all that focused on it. I was just... But when I asked my uncle his password, he was like, you know that it hasn't changed, right? I know, but I can't remember it in your phone. Like, can we stop tech-shaming each other and can you just give me the password? And so eventually he did stop tech-shaming me. So I mean, you know, this is the uncle that worked for BBN. He was literally there when... Oh, I can't remember the guy's name. I invented email. So Ray... Oh gosh, email. Why can't I remember? Email. Wasn't it Ray Tomlinson? Is that the right name coming to me? I think so. Tomlinson. Tomlinson. I got it right. Okay. But he was there, you know, when that happened. So, you know, he comes from a background where, you know, he can enjoy tech-shaming. His thinks he's a techie nephew. So there you go. I remember them. Bolt, Peranak and Newman, I think it is. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah, they were kind of a big deal with the internet. And a lot of things. They were also acoustics engineers. I think I'm okay to share the story. I'm going to share it. And then maybe I'll get in trouble. They were tasked by, contracted by Mattel, to solve the problem of, and I forget which toy it was, but it was one of the first, you know, toys that you pull the string and it makes a sound. And it's one of several sounds. And they built this toy and it couldn't, you know, it would make the sound, but people didn't know what it was saying. They hired, Mattel was like, great, smart folks, BBN, let's go, like you figure it out. And so they did figure it out. They went through everything. They did lots of different testing, acoustic stuff. But you know, the tech was, this was decades ago. The tech just wasn't quite there. You want to know what their answer was, John? I'll give you one guess. No? Put the phrases on the box. Once people know what they are about to hear, they hear it, no problem. Yup. And that's what, that's what the answer was. It was brilliant, you know, but yeah, tell people what it is. So, hey, there's, there are many ways to engineer solutions. And sometimes the human element is the one that needs to be considered. Anyway, yes, Bill, back to your question. Sorry about the tangent. Hopefully that was interesting. The, I'm experiencing the same thing. So I'm not, unfortunately, you may be right. Now the question is why are they, why are they not syncing between Max and, like, like my Max have them, my iPhone and iPad devices do not. So is there, are there two databases there that are being synced? Is there, are we both experiencing a problem that's not, you know, have you done a reset network settings on your phone? The problem is it's really hard. You can't, you can't go into your phone and see what's in its Wi-Fi list. So you, there's no easy way to say, are they the same? You just have to start visiting networks and see if it shows up. Right. You can only do that on the Max side. Correct. That's the check. Correct. So we may be on to something. The other thing you may want to make sure of is, so if you go into settings, click on your Apple ID, iCloud, make sure Keychain is on. Good point. Yes. Keychain is on, but you're right. It was iCloud Keychain is sort of the, the mechanism via which these passwords get shared. You're right. Yeah. I know. So. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, man. I don't know what it is. Yeah. But, but you're right. Yeah. I wish I had an answer, but I don't. So geek challenge. If somebody knows more about this and can explain what both Bill and I have seen, please let us know. I think we said it earlier. Feedback at MacGeekUp.com. Yes. Yes. Feedback at MacGeekUp. Well, we're on the Wi-Fi thing, although changing gears quite a bit. We'll go to listener Jeff, who says I have a Synology router discussed on a previous MacGeekUp episode. I, or as advised, I manually entered the Google DNS settings or DNS servers into the router. How does that work with my connected iPads, Macs and iPhones? Does the router set DNS override what the connected devices are set at? Or do I need to set them all for Google DNS? So the answer is you're right. Bear with me here. I'll give you the actual answer. If you leave, first of all, if you leave your router's DHCP settings at their standard, which you probably have, like you can go and override all of these things. But if things are set pretty much normally and yet you've, if things are set pretty much normally and on your client devices, you have not overridden any of the settings there, then what generally will happen is when your device gets an address from your router or via DHCP, your device will also be handed a DNS server, a domain name server, and almost always that is the address of the router. So your device uses the router as its DNS server and then the router uses whatever DNS servers it is set to, either the default ones or in your case, you've overridden them with Google DNS. It uses those for its lookups and then it usually keeps a small cache so that if multiple client devices are asking for the same thing in a short period of time, it just hands it out so that it doesn't have to go out to the internet and look and obviously makes things more efficient. So in your case, if you set your router to use Google DNS and then just have your client devices connect, it's gonna be fine. Just make sure you're not overriding DNS on your client devices. If you override on your client devices, it will use what you put in on each device, not what happens at the router. So does that answer your question? I hope it does. Does that make sense to you, John? Did I miss anything there? No. Yeah. The thing that I'm looking for here is how do you... the command line. So if I look at my system, it has 172.16.1.1, I think. Okay. That's your router's address. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. Now I'm trying to see if there's a way to list what DNS servers are in the router and I don't think you can do that. No, your Mac can't see what your router's DNS servers are. You have to do that from your router's interface, either a web interface or an app or whatever. But yeah, your Mac doesn't know because it's not handing those down. It's just handing... the router is handing its own address down. No, it's a good question. It's a great question, in fact. Yeah. Yep. Yep. All right. Moving on. Moving on. We had... we might have, well, more to the saga of the iMac startup chimes because evidently there are multiple... multiple members of our audience experiencing this, right? Yes. Let me... let me get Rich up here. Okay, yeah, this is weird how this... this problem is... is rearing its ugly head in multiple places. So, anyways, Rich says... yeah, he has a comment about the Muffel startup chime. He just got an M1 iMac 16... slash 500. Okay. After trading in my 2017 27-inch iMac, the old iMac was having issues that I wasn't confident Apple had results, so I took the opportunity to get the new one at a reasonable trade-in... veteran's discount. Okay. Nice. I know they had a veteran's discount. That's a good tip. If you didn't know... yeah, I didn't know that either. That's a good tip. Yeah. I mean, I know they have government, educational, and corporate discounts, but... okay, it's nice that they offer a veteran's discount. I knew I could have paid the old iMac once while troubleshooting, and now the new iMac again, so I spent a lot of time just getting up and running, and I don't want to replace the computer if Apple even offered to. Everything about the new iMac works fine, except for somewhat muffled chime. I thought that maybe I left the wrapping plastic over the speakers. Music sounds fine, but certainly not as good as when I had a small 2.1 speaker system hooked up to it. Short of returning the computer, do you think this is an isolated glitch in the software? Is it a harboring or other issues on the motherboard? The only thing is that it seems to be an ongoing and known issue with some iMacs per early reports. I mean, the question is, can you put up with it? Assuming everything else is working. But to your question, if the part of the system is working where it could certainly be a sign of potential failure of other parts in the system, if you were in the return or warranty period for it, I'd have them try to make you happy. Yeah. Yeah, especially I remember the last comment. They said, although it's cosmetic issue, it's like, no, it's not. No, cosmetic would be like a pixels out or something, only even that. Yeah, even that. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. It's not working right. So it's weird that this only seems to be happening on iMacs. Well, that we've heard of, but two very different iMacs, right? Like the first one from Listener John was an Intel iMac from 2019. And then this one from Listener Rich is an M1 iMac, which is remarkably different in all the ways. Looks like a Mac, smells like a Mac, acts like a Mac. Underneath, yeah, they're both Macs, but they're two very different Macs. So that's the disturbing part of this, is I wonder, you had mused in the first time we talked about this, that maybe it's a firmware issue, like literally maybe the sound file itself is either, maybe not damaged, but maybe it's gained up too high and causing the speaker to distort when trying to play that particular thing back, but everything else, you control your own destiny with the volume so you don't crank things to the point where they distort. So I wonder if they need to ratchet back the gain on that startup. That's weird. I wonder, I need to mess with this. Really, I need to test it because I have a 2019 iMac sitting literally right in front of me, but because as we discussed in a month or two ago, I have it set to restart on its own. I'm almost never here when it starts up. So I have not heard the startup chime on this in quite some time. I'm curious if it's messed up. So I'm not going to test it right now though, for obvious reasons, but I'm curious to that. And I also want to experiment with like, is my startup chime volume dependent on my Mac's volume. I know there was a period of time where that was true on laptops. I'm not sure if that's true on desktops. I just haven't dug in. So I feel like there's a mystery to solve here and maybe we can help. So I'll mess around a little bit this week. I'll intentionally restart my Mac here and do some testing. But if any of you do testing, I know we've said it several times, feedback at MacGeekCab.com. All right. Let's do... Let's see. We've got some cool stuff found coming up. We've got more questions. So let's do Brian's question here. Then I want to tell you about our sponsors and we'll do some cool stuff found. How's that sound to you, John? Fantastic. Good. All right. So listener Brian asks, he says, I'm 1200 miles away from my daughter who asked me to help her set up her Wi-Fi in her new apartment. I went for simplicity and because the apartment is small, sent her an ERO Pro 6 as a router. She has Comcast and we got the router set up fairly easily. She had her old 802.11N the airport extreme, so I suggested that she set that up in bridge mode, cable it via ethernet to the ERO and use it as a time machine destination. So far so good. I tried to have her use the old system of speeding up the backup, start the backup over Wi-Fi and give it some time, then move the time machine hard drive to the laptop and let it finish there, then move the drive back to the airport extreme. We ran into some problems with that though, so I told her to just leave the time machine drive on the airport extreme and let time machine do its job over Wi-Fi. My question is, could I achieve similar speed up by attaching the laptop to the airport extreme via ethernet cable and would I need to turn off Wi-Fi on the laptop to force it to send the data over ethernet or change the order of networks and network system preferences to make ethernet the prime data connection? She and her roommate have a total of three MacBook Pros, some old, some fairly new, with substantial numbers of files, so any backup time saved would be much appreciated. Yeah, so I don't know that I ever had any success moving a backup from a time capsules type setup or an airport extreme setup, moving a drive from that to a direct attached, the format of the way it saves files is remarkably different. If you do it over a network, it saves to a sparse bundle. If you do it to a direct attached drive, it just puts it in a folder structure. So I don't know that I've ever heard of that. You may have, like, I may be the one out of touch here. That's totally possible, but I've never heard of that before. What I have heard of is the other thing that you suggested, and that is, you know, connecting via Ethernet as far as making sure it go, and yes, I think that will work just fine. In fact, there's no reason to even start it over Wi-Fi. You can just start it over Ethernet. It's a network backup either way. Time Machine probably doesn't even know that it's running over Wi-Fi versus Ethernet. It knows that it's sending it over the network and the operating system takes care of the nitty-gritty. So I think starting it over Ethernet would be good. Turning off Wi-Fi certainly is the safe way, especially from 1200 miles away, to ensure that it is using the Ethernet connection. But you're right. If you set the network service order, and I highly recommend that we all do this unless you have some specific reason not to, if you're in a scenario where you could use Ethernet or Wi-Fi sort of interchangeably, especially with a laptop, when you connect to Ethernet for the first time, set that as the top connection. In fact, I do that on my iMacs here, which are all Etherneted in, Wi-Fi is the secondary connection. And when I say secondary, I mean, go into system preferences, go into network, and then do... There's a little... Well, it used to be a settings gear, but now it's a little dot-dot-dot gear at the bottom of the list of devices and choose set service order and make your Ethernet connection live above your Wi-Fi connection. That way, if they're both happened to be connected, you'll only send data or you'll primarily send data over Ethernet if they're on the same network. If they're on different networks, then you're actually even smart enough to be able to do that. So, for example, if I'm testing a new router and configuring a router, I can leave my Ethernet connected so that my iMac gets connected to the internet. It's at the top, but I connect to the other router with Wi-Fi and because it's different IP addresses, I can put either one into my browser and it knows where to go because it knows where to go. So, that's the beauty of TCP-IP. So, yeah, put it as a first one. You should be fine. I think you're being in good shape. And then if the Ethernet connection happens to drop out, it'll fall back to Wi-Fi. And if you plug Ethernet in, it'll jump back up to Ethernet. Like, this is how that works. And it works fairly smoothly. Like I said, this is not Apple's magic per se. This is TCP-IP being implemented the way it was built to be implemented. So, it is. I mean, there's a lot of Apple magic in there, following the protocol. Got any thoughts on that one, John? When I do my... Yeah, I'm with you. When I do... When I create a new time machine backup, I actually plug into Ethernet and not Wi-Fi because it's faster. Yeah, right. Oh, it makes perfect sense. It's great. Smart. Now, the other thing to reduce backup time as well is just take a peak time machine options. May want to exclude monstrously huge files. I do that with my time machine backups. So, like I'm looking here, so I do not backup my VMs or my photo library because they're just really big files. Sure. I mean, I'll back them up when I make a clone. Okay. So, just a suggestion. Yeah. Yeah, no. That's actually really good advice. Yeah, back them up some way but to keep your time machine backups from ballooning too quickly. Yeah, isolating those out. That makes sense. All right, cool. We got some cool stuff found to do. The next thing I want to do is tell you about our sponsors if that works for you, Mr. Braun. Absolutely. All right, our first sponsor today is Amazon Pharmacy. We're at Amazon.com slash MGGRX. 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I love what they're doing there because we geeks are always going to need a server for something, whether it's for our development environment, you know, you need a build server, whether it's for a WordPress site you're setting up, whether it's for a Minecraft server you want to set up, whether it's for a Plex server that you want to set up in the cloud. I know it's very cool what you can do here and Linode makes it easy because they are the server experts. Not only do they have, you know, these data centers all over the world, but they're also good at just managing servers. That's what they do. We're geeks about lots of things. They're geeks about managing servers. So let them be your server managing geeks. It's fantastic. They're also customer service geeks, right? They've been voted the top infrastructure as a service provider by both G2 and Trust Radius. They've got 24-7 365 support human-powered support. If you need help, someone will pick up the phone, respond to your email or reply to you on social media. This is what they do. So you got to go check it out, especially their marketplace where you pick the apps that I was telling you before, the Plex and the Minecraft and the WordPress. You're going to be impressed. And, and, and, when you visit linode.com slash mgg, you can create a free account with your Google or GitHub account or even just email address. When you do that, this is where it gets great. You get $100 in credit so that you can start using your server and seeing how it works without paying anything out of pocket. No credit card required. Go check it out. Use your $100 in free credit. Visit linode linode.com slash mgg. Then our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. I'm going to take us to, John, you want to take us to listener, John? Absolutely. So here's something cool, I think. I heard Dave talking about apps for the Apple Watch while bike riding and you really need to check out this app. It's called Work Outdoors and measures location, altitude, heart rate, has nice spectrum apps with zoom and pan on the watch. You can see a route on the map and then every session syncs to the phone. This is the most impressive app on my watch. Huh, slash phone. I've had it for several years. It is rock solid, highly customizable, doesn't suck the life out of your watch battery and it's about six bucks. That sounds pretty cool. I got to check this. I've never heard of this before. So Work Outdoors.net Yeah. Very cool. Wow. I'm just looking at the website for it. Yeah, that is cool. All right. I will check it out. I promise. I checked something out though, John and that is the new pluggable USB 3 7 port charging hub. It's 50 bucks at Amazon. Actually just shy of 50 bucks today. We've been talking a lot about in fact, it was in the last episode. I think it was listener Larry. I couldn't have that. I could have the name wrong was asking, you know, how do I get more USB C ports like that? Because that's a that's a thing. And his desire was to have more USB C ports for high speed connections to drives, right? You know, the specifically those sorts of things. And we need to remember I know we always say on the show the letter for USB describes the shape of the connector. The number describes the speed. We need to remember that USB A can do you know, fast speeds, not the fastest, but can do 5 gigabit per second USB and many of the drives that we're going to want to connect, not all, but many are going to use exactly that. And so this is one of those things where looking at this hub, it is a USB 3.0 hub. So 5 gigs per second. You can plug your devices in. It's externally powered. And that's what enables it to have. It's got a 60 watt power adapter. So all seven ports have 2.4 amps of power on them, which is great. And you can stack these obviously, they're actually built to be a little bit stackable. You need a different power supply for each one, but you know, you can link them up if you really want and have lots of USB. But I had an old USB 2.0 hub on my Mac that I used for sort of all of the extra things. I think it was a 5 port hub that was fine for like my audio devices and my mouse and keyboard or whatever. And I've replaced it with this. And so it's nice to have all USB 3.0 ports and not some 12 year old device sitting out there. 50 bucks. Now I know I can just plug in and get charged. So A, cool stuff out. And B, let's remember to be intentional about which ports we're using for what because you don't want to necessarily waste that 10 gig USB port on a device that can not go faster than a 5 gig or even a 1 gig USB port might be able to use. So just need to think about that. Good stuff. All right. Any questions on that, John? Any thoughts to add? Otherwise I'll move us on. Moving on. Moving on! In the last episode I asked for suggestions about universal remotes John because Harmony is going away. Has been discontinued. And I'm sad to report that I've only seen one email come in thus far. I may have missed one and I'm hoping that that's true but one email about universal remote alternatives saddens me because there are lots of us. It was a topic that actually came up with Minority Uncles this weekend and the Minority Family that they all use Harmony remotes and they're like, yeah, what are we going to do? I'm like, I don't know but we're going to figure it out. So, but Kirit writes, I have been using control 4 remotes for the last several years and enjoying them. I have a large home with 16 devices and my control 4 system serves in all the locations in the house and works with them all. But it is integrated in the smart home that may be a problem for some if you don't want to go that far. But it's very professional and integrates well with iOS. So, I have not tested these out yet but I'm definitely going to learn more. It looks like an interesting solution. It sort of attacks the problem a little bit differently than the Harmony remotes did but you know, seems like a good platform. So at least there's that. Hopefully there's more. Thank you for that Kirit. Good stuff. Please send in your suggestions though if you're using a universal remote that you like that you could still buy today. Let us know. Feedback at MackieCub.com What do you got, John? We got a quick one here from Gary. Okay. Hi, Gary. This is amazing if true. And he leads us to a website that I've actually used before, teni.com I guess the best way to describe it is a reverse image search. Okay. You paste an image into it or submit it or give it a URL to an image and it will then tell you where that image came from. Okay. I found the best use for this is fact checking every now and then you'll see somebody make a post and they'll post like, you know, a picture of oh, the crowds at this or that event. Look at them. Isn't that amazing? And I've had cases where I'm like, I don't know if I believe that and so if you do a reverse image search with teni it'll show you where the image of the crowds came from. It's kind of fun. It's kind of fun to do that. Images.google.com is also another site where you can do this sort of thing. You can just upload an image. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it will show you what other sites that image is on and it can be enlightening. I use it. We use it internally here at TMO. I guess you don't publish a ton of articles, but we use it here at TMO if we're going to use an image and we don't know the source of it. You know, we get a lot of things from like, we have a subscription with Shutterstock so that we know that we're using licensed images and things like that. But if we don't know if somebody sends us something and we want to make sure that they realistically had the rights to extend those rights to us, we just throw it quick into Google Image Search and then you can see where else has this image been used and if it's clearly from a source that's not where you thought it was, well, and you can make sure you're doing the right thing. So, yeah. Fascinating. It's also interesting if you have your own images that you've created and put those into Google Image Search and see where people are using your stuff. Yeah, there's lots of interesting things. You also find similar images which can be helpful if you're looking for a larger version of, you know, if you grabbed something from somewhere. Again, you know, with no intention of using it for commercial purposes, but you know, you want to share an image with family or something and you realize, oh, I've got a thumbnail of this thing that looks terrible. I wish I had the large version. TinEye or Google Image Search can, you know, find you that same image. But look, here's a 4,000 pixel version of it. Like, enjoy. So, it can be handy. Yeah. Yeah, I sometimes do that when posting articles. Sometimes it's frustrating to write an article because not every vendor has a very good press section. Sure. Like, I find the thing that's frustrating for me is I try to find an image that has a white background and I can't find it. It's like, ugh. Yeah. So, sometimes I'll use this and yeah, it'll find a version that makes a better-looking article. I will also throw into the ring an app that I could not live without and that is Pixelmator Pro. If you've ever been frustrated by trying to learn Photoshop, use Pixelmator Pro. It's so much simpler than anything else I've ever tried and arguably so much more powerful than even Photoshop. Seriously. Like, this is a world-class photo editing app and I couldn't do what we do without it. It's what I used to create, like, all the artwork that you see in our, you know, our Mackie Gab images. I do that with it, but that's such a simple use. But, there are times when I need to either remove or replace the background color in an image to make it fit better, you know, in an article and Pixelmator Pro, man, like, that is the key to it. And there's so, they've got so many features that leverage ML and machine learning now that, like resizing an image. I can re, they've got, it's magic, man. I can resize an image up and it retains its quality in, like, so many weird cases that I would never expect it to be able to do this. So it's, and it's just, I don't know, I find it super intuitive. So, and you can go get a free trial and everything. So I highly recommend it. It was not on my list of cool stuff found, but boy, howdy, is it one of those apps that I couldn't live without. So I highly recommend it. I'll put a link in the show notes. Are we good on this? Should we keep moving here? All right. Listener Gary, different Gary, sends in he says, I was listening to the latest MGG and you were talking about phone cases and screen protectors. For people who don't like bulky cases, like my younger brother, you should check out later case. They make their cases out of Kevlar, but also say they aren't military tested and so on. So they don't come and they don't come with a screen protector. One thing, maybe they are military tested. I'm not sure what you meant by that. Anyway, one thing they do differently is that unlike other phone cases where they have the whole camera square cut out, these guys only cut out the lenses, the LED flash and the LiDAR sensor in the case of a phone like a 12 Pro Max that has a LiDAR sensor. They're also prescient. They also have cutouts where the volume switch, power speakers are etc. for each phone. Got it. OK, yeah. So they get that right. But yeah, it looks like a really sort of slim protective case. It's latercase.com, L-A-T-E-R case.com. And you can see how they do. They sort of mold right around the camera lenses and really sort of protect the edges of those. These are sharp looking cases. That's interesting. I like that. Nice. Kevlar being the material that I believe the bulletproof vests are made out of. I think that that's what I think of it as. Yeah, I don't know if they still make bulletproof vests out of Kevlar, but it would make sense. Like why not? Yeah. Sure. So, so you get a bulletproof phone. That's nice. That's, that's nice. Yeah, man. Hey, you know, you never know. You can stop bullets with it. I don't know. I don't know if they advertise that. Right. That's, that's, that's our words, not theirs. So, yeah, yeah. Best of luck to you if you're in a scenario where that matters. Yeah. I don't have it on so I can't show it on the video right now. But my next cool stuff found is the Golden Concepts Apple Watch Bands. I'll call them Apple Watch Bands, but they really are cases that have a band attached. You know me. I love my mechanical watches. I'm into that whole thing and these folks at Golden Concept have sort of taken the luxury watch look and applied it to the Apple Watch. The cases that I've seen from them and I think this is their first round of cases really have sort of the design language that reminds me of Hublot's watches. If anybody knows what those look like. They have, you see sort of the screws on the outside of the case, but very elegant. And I wore this for about a week and a half and then I was doing some other things and didn't want to have a gold watch case on my Apple Watch. So I went back to my other one, but you pop the watch into the case and then it's got the band around it. So it does make it pretty chunky, but that's a look and that is that Hublot look too. So it kind of makes sense that it all sort of fits into that realm. I don't think they have anything to do with Hublot. I'm just using that as a descriptor for anybody that follows that world. But they're like it was like 700 bucks I think is what the retail is on the case that they sent me to test. And I actually liked it. It was comfortable. It has a deployant clasp on it. So it holds on your wrist nicely. Putting the watch in was really interesting. You twist it over and take the back off with four screws and then put the watch in this like little rubber sleeves so that it doesn't get scratched by the metal case and you're not scratching the metal case either. The one problem with it is that because it's all inside of this case the ECG sensor on the watch is not available for you to touch. So you cannot effectively do an ECG on your watch with it in one of these. But they say that they're working on that. So it's cool. So if you're into that kind of thing you're probably going to love what they're doing over there. It's worth checking out Golden Concepts. I think it's just Golden Concepts. GoldenConcept.com Alright. That's what I got. You got any other cool stuff found or should we jump to some more questions and things like that, John? Let's jump. Let's jump. It's jump time. I wanted to share I moved to fiber. I consolidated to put fiber in my neighborhood. I mentioned that a couple of months ago and I moved to it. And it has been rock solid. I've maintained my Comcast connection here just to have as a backup. But other than there was one day actually I think those little problems that we had where the show like our connection dropped out one or two weeks in a row while we were doing the show or maybe it dropped out once or twice in the middle of the same episode. I think that might have been a consolidated issue the next week. They had like a it wasn't a full outage, but it was a day of really, really slow connection. And so I plugged in the Comcast router and used it that day. You know, it's brand, it's not just brand new to me. It's brand new to the entire area here. So that's why I kept the Comcast thing around for a little while was just in case to have that backup. I very specifically did not wire it up. My router will let me do a fallback and I initially very specifically did not wire it up that way because I wanted to know that how well I could rely on this consolidated thing. Plus even in our scenario where I had that outage, a fallback wouldn't have saved us because you need to reconnect and all that stuff. But I did run into an issue, John and that was we still have Comcast for our cable on the TV and we have a smart TV an LG smart TV in the living room and that does not have our Comcast box but it has the Xfinity stream app on it so if we want to do anything via our Comcast DVR, we just run the Xfinity stream app and it's fine and the Xfinity DVR is up in the bedroom because they force us to have one and so we just put it up in the bedroom. It's fine. But I do tell it to record some things. It's sort of a backup for the Tivo at times and we wanted to watch something that Tivo for whatever reason hadn't recorded and I'm like, oh no problem. And so I launched the Xfinity stream app and it says you need to be connected to your Comcast Wi-Fi for this to work. And then it hit me that Comcast DVR does not connect to the internet via my house. It connects like it does not connect to my home Wi-Fi. It just has a coax connection coming into it and you know it gets its internet from Comcast over the coax because why not? And so it hit me. I'm like, wait this doesn't know that we're in the same house. In fact, it doesn't know that we're in the same house. It might be able to know we're in the same town but because my TV gets its internet from consolidated it's saying, oh yeah, this device isn't coming from an IP that is Comcast and so I'm not going to let you connect to your DVR. And I thought, well by golly we're going to solve this problem because it's not okay. I pay for Comcast internet and so I started thinking and I'm like, okay well my router will let me have both connected so I immediately wired that up and I did set it up with a fallback now that I know that I can trust consolidated although I'll probably be canceling Comcast internet soon anyway because I don't need it and although for this purpose I might and so I thought, okay I can set routing tables and so what I did was I wired up the Comcast internet as the fallback and set it that way so nothing on the network will use it unless I literally unplug the consolidated thing and then I went into the routing tables and said, okay I gave my TV a fixed IP address and I said everything that comes from this IP address route to that interface that is plugged into the Comcast not the main interface or don't use the fallback pattern and boom it worked I was able to get my Comcast internet or Comcast TV with Xfinity Stream no problem and all good and then so that was a nice little problem to solve with that knowledge I was helping my daughter set up her new college apartment and she has a smart TV and they have internet from Comcast but they don't pay for TV from Comcast but she has the Xfinity Stream app on her TV and I thought, well wait a minute if I log in to the Xfinity Stream app on her TV ain't no way that thing's gonna know because she's in the same town it's just like you know two miles away it's probably gonna just let me connect to my DVR sure enough connected to my DVR no problem so I also set up then I went crazy John I set up a separate router that I plugged my Comcast cable motor into and that router is another Synology router it's the old 1900 AC but the Wi-Fi actually the Wi-Fi might be on it but it doesn't matter I set up a VPN server on it so that if I'm ever out and I want to connect to my Comcast thing I can network in that way and now have a Comcast IP here in Durham, New Hampshire or wherever they would assign it to that would let me attach to that stuff so this is all just an exercising geekery because I'm probably gonna cancel my Comcast service anyway I'm also thinking of cancelling my TV service John and going to YouTube TV it would mean giving up Tevo that's the biggest issue that I would have but YouTube TV's DVR is really good and it would let me use it anywhere I think you can have five devices attached at any one time so my kids could use it at college it might be the way to go so I've been thinking about that too I don't know have you messed with YouTube TV at all no okay yeah it's I know quite a few people that are using it and it seems to be a good way to go so I don't know I have on the order probably about ten shows that I watch via cable so not in any rush to get off of cable well that's just the thing YouTube TV would get you all of those shows it brings you your broadcast channels that's yeah no that's the thing about YouTube TV is it replaces your cable and brings you all your local broadcast channels and all of that stuff and again a DVR that is cloud based and uses YouTube servers and all that stuff so no yeah yeah yeah and it's cheap man I want to say it's 50 bucks a month but I think I'm wrong on that there's different levels of it I've just started looking into this I know that's what I'm saying works with your smart TVs and Brian8944 in the chat room is saying there are a few competitors to YouTube TV that may be cheaper and offer a similar product such as Sling's products yeah okay so it's 65 bucks a month normally they've got a special that I'm seeing on their website right now that's 55 for your first three months 55 a month for your first three months but I'll put a link to YouTube TV in the in the show notes it's because you know it's an interesting thing yeah I'd be curious to hear about anybody's experience with either YouTube TV or like war sorry that Brian8944 said it's competitors so because there's we don't have to have our we don't have to have our cable anymore so to get the it's the broadcast channels right I mean it really it's sports that that is the thing that drives this I mean this show the 10 shows if you're not watching sports the 10 shows that you watch John could probably be gotten via you know buying individual networks streaming packages oh but and actually sometimes yeah every now and then the TV doesn't get it right the schedule's wrong or something like that and frequently I'm able to find the episode that I missed online somewhere either streaming it the next day from a web browser or like for example CW has an app and most of their stuff they let you stream for free just by running their app so I don't know I'm just comfortable with cable and my TV sure of course I'll know that and the TV also where of course like you I got the you know lifetime subscription right right for that but yeah but the price that you're paying for cable and I mean don't get me wrong I get it that's how they get us right like momentum is a powerful thing and especially especially with something like this like even though we're nerds here we don't necessarily want to have to be troubleshooting things when it's time to sit down and watch a show on TV so the if it ain't broke don't fix it policy really does apply even for us nerds in that scenario I just I want to be able to like if that's going to be my wind down time then that's what I want and you know so moving to this is it's a friction point right but my guess is you're paying a lot more than 65 bucks a month for what you're doing and that's especially true for us now because we're not using I mean we are paying for Comcast internet I ratcheted it down to like the slowest service they would sell me just to have as a backup but but it's got another point where I don't need it so so yeah it's interesting there's there's solutions here alright where are we here on time oh we still got more time uh you want to take us to Sean John oh sure alright um alright Sean in an earlier episode had a question about let's see he was he was trying to upgrade a machine to big sir and it wasn't working okay so um yeah it wasn't seeing the partition so I offered a suggestion and he he basically got back to me and uh uh followed the four steps where I said where he says I cloned erased installed and restored success great success great success yeah great success clone erase format wait what was that again say that again cloned erased installed and restored cloned erased installed and restored I like it okay I like it that's good so clone erase install yeah yeah yeah okay that makes sense so my conclusion is that yeah there was something in the partition or volume table or whatever you want to call it that was screwed up on the destination yeah and this was a correct 2019 so yes yeah okay all right okay interesting all right I like it thank you Sean yeah no that's good that's good to know and it's that those that four step process clone erase install restore that's like there's magic to that right there I like it good good all right let's see what else do we have here John any other fun little things let's see yeah yeah yeah yeah you wait until you let's do Eddie okay where where where Eddie is in is in Evernote yeah I know I'm jumping us around but it's got a he's got a messages issue and so yeah oh boy hate these all right so let's see so um hello Dave John and maybe soon Pilate Pete again um I have an issue logging into messages on my second gen 11 inch iPad pro for some reason I was logged out not through anything I knowingly did of messages and I'm getting the um uh exclamation point red exclamation point icon on the messages app when I open the app I get the login messages pop up see attached screenshot with the account pre-populated asking for my password fill in my password it turns for a bit and then seemingly does nothing if I go to the app and settings it says verifying at the top and basically lops up the settings app all I can do swipe up and quit I've tried a couple of reboots I did the first one when I found the pop up asking for the password just in case it was sort of me in on the middle attack with no change all my other computers iPhone and services on this iPad sign into this account are working fine any suggestions uh every now and then I have issues with messages um I mean my suggestion would be that logging out of and back into iCloud be one thing that may help yeah um another thought is that the password data that you're accessing may be corrupted so assuming you're using iCloud keychain um settings Apple ID iCloud keychain may be turning that on and off again may help um and then the last thing although extreme and time-consuming would be to do a restore on the device right right huh I wonder restore from a backup um you know yeah yeah right yeah restore yeah yeah there's some corrupt data somewhere it's just you know how do we get to the point where we can clear it out so I think the steps that I yeah I I actually I agree with your steps I I think the sign out of iCloud and sign back in and maybe even sign out of iCloud wait five minutes restart the the iPad you know to power it off turn it back on sign back in that I think that would fix it with the least amount of hassle um the one step I would insert sort of after that and before the wipe it and restore would be to change your iCloud password it sounds like it's not able to log in and I'm guessing the problem is localized to your iPad which is why I think the sign out of iCloud and sign back in would be the right way to go however if it is some sync issue with the password database on Apple's end change your password force it to you know, repopulate on their end and then bring it back in again I mean that's a little bit of a Hail Mary in that you know it's like the pre Hail Mary I don't want to have to go and do the terrible thing of wiping my device so let's at least rule out that it's this because it would stink to wipe the whole thing and have the same problem right so that would that would be that would be the only thing I could think of otherwise yeah man I'm with you alright well it's been fun but all good things my friends must come to their logical end and we are at our logical end here or at least our temporal end but it's not an end it's a pause we will wrap this episode up nicely cleanly quite well I'll say it's been real but it hasn't been real fun oh my goodness no it has been real fun yes alright yeah thanks for listening thanks for checking everything out make sure please please please please please we talked about YouTube early in the episode and it reminded me please go subscribe to our YouTube channel I know everybody asked you that but really it's we're doing a lot of stuff over there and I would love to have you over there with us I would love to have your feedback on what we're doing it you know having the little compartmentalized segments of the show really seems to be taking off over there we won't stop doing the big show you know that's how we get the little compartmentalized segments it's actually really kind of nice to be able to do it both ways so we'd love to have you over there and helping us out and really the one thing so this is actually the second thing I say it's the one thing this will be the main thing that I would ask share the show with your friend pick one friend tell them about the show you can pick two if you want you know but pick one friend share the show with them we would love that can be on social media can be you know wherever via email whatever it can be in person if you want but share the show with somebody that's really truly our best way of growing what we're doing here and and now we've given you little things like you could take little snippets from this episode that we're going to put out and share those with a friend like that's super valuable because maybe your friend doesn't want to listen to you know an hour and 15 minutes of of us doing this they don't know yet that they want to listen to an hour and 15 minutes of us doing this so share the little snippets show them how great it is and then maybe just maybe you'll be able to bring them into the Mackie Keb family we would be ever so thankful forever so thankful all right Brian 8944 did just send us a link for comparing from a guy named Clark Howard comparing live streaming TV so I will retroactively go put that in the show notes here too so thanks Brian all right John you got anything to share with them before it's time to play the outro music all good all right thanks folks thanks for hanging out thanks for checking out our sponsors of course amazon.com mggrxlatterlife.com mgg and linode.com mgg of course Mackie Keb.com sponsors always has those links have lots more for you too share that if you like as well lots of coupons thanks for hanging out with us thanks for everything thanks for sharing the show with your friends and thanks for making sure you spend a little extra effort for yourself this week so that you don't get caught