 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 704 for Monday, April 9th, 2018. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, mix it all together, answer your questions, share your tips, share your cool stuff found. The goal is that every single one of us learns at least five new things every week when we get together. Each and every week when we get together, that is. Sponsors for this episode include bare-bones software. BB Edit 12.1 is out, and it definitely still does not suck. We'll talk more about why that is in a moment. But here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, mixing up a tasty Mac stew. Tasty Mac stew, I like it. This is John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? Ah, I'm telling you, I'm making a stew, man. Go forward to it after we're done. That's good. Cool. Yum. Not really. Oh, you should be though. It seems like one of those days. I don't know. It's like sunny, but a little cold. Yeah. Let's just jump right into it. We have a cool stuff found, a few cool stuff found, cool stuff's found for you, including our first, which comes to us courtesy of Craig from the last show, number 703, where he says, I just finished listening and thought I would pass on an answer to the geek challenge regarding geotagging photos. I often need to geotag photos taken with my DSLR camera that doesn't have geotagging capacity. I have been using Huda Geo, H-O-U-D-A-H, GEO, and found it quite powerful. It works with individual files as well as photos from within the photos app. You can search for locations, use a map, or even use a reference photo that does have GPS info, a feature I find very handy. I will often have also taken a photo from my iPhone at the same location or close by that I can use as a reference photo for Huda Geo to take the GPS coordinates from. I know that you can add location info to photos inside the photos app, of course, but from what I've read, doing it that way does not update the EXIF tags but stores it as photo data in the photos app, much like tags, and so may not go with the photo if you export it or use it elsewhere. Awesome. Thank you so much, Craig. That's great. And yeah, you know, it's possible. This is the first time we've mentioned Huda on the show, and that kind of surprises me, A, that it's been 13 years, but I don't think we've ever mentioned, so they make Huda Geo, which of course we just talked about, and then Huda Spot that's useful for like finding files better than the finder's search, and they've got all kinds of things. So anyway, I'm glad to be mentioning this stuff. Thank you, Craig. Actually, thank you, everybody. There were a few handfuls of you that suggested Huda Geo, so thanks for that. That's fun to say. Huda. Huda. Moving on. Anything on that, John, before I move us along? No, it disappoints me that Apple's kind of drawing outside of the lines. Yeah, that's not surprising. I mean, I've seen that, but it's not always that way with photo. Like I've seen photos add XIF data. At least I thought it did, but maybe I'm wrong. Seth brings us to, I will find it here, Seth writes, I've always had mixed results trying to get workflows or apps to run on a schedule using the calendar app. Sometimes they run, sometimes they don't. I recently came upon an app called Launch D Task Scheduler in the App Store for 399 US. It has a simple GUI right to the point, choose the app or workflow and schedule and done the app runs when it is supposed to run every single time. And I've put a link to that, of course, in the show notes. Yeah, Launch D is like the thing that the system uses to kick off all sorts of events and things like that. So tapping directly into it is by far going to be the best way. I've always used something called Lingon. And we've talked about that on the show a few times, but for this particular purpose, having this purpose built app, it certainly is easier than digging through Lingons, more complex and more, more featured interface. But again, for that one sole purpose of scheduling things, Launch D Task Scheduler looks pretty good. So thank you for that, Seth. Anything on that, John? Yeah. And I mean, if you want to dive into it, I think what it's really doing. So I think you have two or three different folders scattered about. So I think launch agents, startup items. And I think there's one other. Well, yeah. So in your library for your home library folder, you have launch agents and maybe launch demons that may or may not be there. But you also have those same two folders in just the main library folder above your user folder. But I think what this app does is it puts it in your home library launch agents folder, which would make sense because that's where those things go. Yeah, yeah, just crafting those by hand is crazy talk. Well, I mean, it's just a it's just an appeal list file, an XML file. I mean, what what I recommend, actually, if you, you know, because it's always good to learn kind of how things work behind the scenes. A, because it's fun, but also B gives you a little bit of foundation for when you have a problem. But I would say get something like this launch D task schedule or create your schedule and then go into that home library launch agents folder and look at the thing you just made in it. And then you can see like what it's doing and how you would craft something like this, and that could be interesting. I that's what I think I don't know. I concur. Sweet listener Norton brings us what I call a cool stuff found reprise. But and I and it's possible this. I know this one has been reprised before it may be the most reprised cool stuff found, which is really interesting and perhaps telling. But he says reset plug by Multinet is the most valuable and useful product I have used on my Wi-Fi network before I installed it. My router would stop working several times a week and I would have to run downstairs to turn it off and on to reset it. No more reset plug does the work perfectly. And my FiOS network springs to life after a minute or two. So this you can find this at reset plug dot com. And what it does is it's it's it's just a it's a plug that you plug into the wall and then you plug your router into this. And it acts you you connect it via Wi-Fi to your router. And it constantly tests the internet connection. And if the internet connection fails, then reset plug will cycle the power on whatever is plugged into it, which should be your router. And then boom, you reset your internet connection. But here's the thing. And like I said, many of you have suggested this in the past, which indicates that there is a problem with routers. And we've seen this not so much lately, at least not with the current crop of routers that are out there. But back in the kind of 802 dot 11 G days, I seem to remember things needing to be rebooted regularly. But if your router is dying several times a week and needs to be rebooted, like I feel like especially he says it's, you know, it's his FiOS network. Like that's that equipment's owned by Verizon and you're renting it from them, I think. And you should go to them and tell them you need to get me something to replace this because it shouldn't be dying three times a week. Like I get that the reset plug is a good thing and, you know, can save your bacon because if your wife or if your router goes haywire, then you've got nothing and you can't get into your network from the outside because your router's gone haywire. So I like it. But I still kind of feel like this is not necessarily a good thing. Like there's there's there's a deeper problem here, right? I like the bacon part of what you just said. OK, well, there you go. I'm glad. But I think I had, yeah, no, I'm with you, though, is that ages ago, I think it was it was one of their misses. But I think it was a mono price Wi-Fi base station. But yeah, you did. You had something like that for now. It would just after a couple of days, it would just roll over. Yeah, just it was one of their misses. Yeah, currently every every product I've gotten from them has has been stellar. Huh, yeah, that's not been the case for me. Like I said, that monitor that I bought a year ago doesn't want to wake up with the Mac. They think that it's actually I'll I'll bring it up. But they think it's the the the data path across the display port is only eight bits, I think, with this one and the other ones, 10 bits. And so it can read that data like the the one I have downstairs is 10 bits. And so it it it does better syncing up when the machine wakes up and getting those messages across. Yeah, I think like it that's the only difference hardware difference between those two things. And they said, yeah, that's probably it. So I don't know. It's a weird thing. Let's see. Well, I had something to add to that, but I don't think. Oh, yeah, I am speaking this weekend. And for anybody in the Philadelphia area, I am speaking at the ML mug or the mainline mug just outside of Philly on Saturday morning. So anybody listening that is in that area, I believe they are. I know they're good people and and I believe that anyone can attend. So I think I think things started like nine thirty or something. I'm going to be talking about running your I think we're calling it running your Mac and iPhone lean, clean and mean. So we'll we'll we'll go through some things that you can do to make sure your stuff's running at peak efficiency and peak performance. Yeah, our pal Chuck out there somewhere. Chuck is out there somewhere. Yeah, I think that's right. Check joiner. So yeah, so mainline mug ML Mug. I think it's ML Mug dot dot org. And so I'll put that in the show. Yeah, just don't don't be too mean. Oh, no, no, they're good people. I spoke with them last year. They're good. I liked them. So OK. While we're on the subject of of good people, I would like to thank our premium subscribers, whose contributions came in this week in the biannual twenty five dollars every six month plan. We have Paul Kay, Ralph F. David C. Chris H. Kurt T. Garrett N. Bob H. James N. All at twenty five. And then in the biannual plan on the choose your own contribution amount, we have both Dominic D and Lawrence H came in at 50 each. So thanks to all of you, you are awesome. We then have Abdullah B. On the monthly ten dollar plan, along with Paul M. Mike C. Mark R. Dave C. Frank A. Working smarter for Mac users, a.k.a. Dr. Mac, Neil L. Scott F. John G. and Barry F. And then we had a one time contribution of 120 bucks from Mr. Brian H. So thanks to all of you. You you make it possible for us to do what we do here. So thanks so much. It means a lot. It really does. I know I say that every week, but we mean it. You know what I mean, John? It it's certainly a motivation. It is a motivation. There you go. Hey, you know, we've talked in the last two episodes about that dialogue that comes up asking you for what appears to be your iCloud password, which could also be iMessage or FaceTime or any one of those things. And we've talked about how someone could, in theory, dig in and create one of those that operated in a nefarious way to capture your iCloud password. Well, listener Jeff comes up with perhaps the perfect cap to put the perfect period to put on this this particular sentence or this paragraph. He says in episode 702, Dave was adamant that the Apple ID dialogue box was trustworthy, not always, Jeff says correctly. Clever app developers in the past have been able to spoof this. There is a very simple way for any user to test whether the dialogue box is real when the dialogue box appears. Just press the home button or on an iPhone 10, swipe up from the bottom. A real Apple ID dialogue box message is an iOS system message and cannot be cleared by pressing the home button or swiping up. If the dialogue box is presented by an app, pressing the home button or swiping up will close the app and the phishing dialogue box along with it. These phishing apps are usually caught by Apple before being posted on the app store. However, peers in China and Europe have seen this attack on iOS devices until Apple pulled the responsible apps. Thank you, Jeff. That's perfect. When you see it, press the home button. If it's still there, type in your password. There's our advice, simple to the point and, most importantly, accurate. So thanks, Jeff. Good stuff, huh, man? Nice. Yeah, I think so. All right, let's get into something a little geeky here. Graham has a has a great little tip for us here. Graham writes. In my yeah, in my accounting software, when I tell it to email out an invoice, it creates a preformatted message and passes it on to the Apple Mail app for immediate sending. However, because I'm running old software, which doesn't properly integrate with current versions of Mac OS, it fails to attach the PDF of the invoice. So I need to prevent mail from actually sending the message until I manually attach the PDF. I'm not 100 percent confident that telling mail to put my accounts into offline status will prevent this. I don't think it will. So you're you're good to not have confidence in that. He says, so I have created a rule in little snitch that blocks outgoing connections from the mail app. Normally, the rule is deactivated, but when I'm doing my invoicing, I activate this rule in little snitch and it causes the generated emails to end up in the drafts folder. Hence, I can be absolutely confident that I have a chance to amend and review the outgoing emails as required. Once reviewed, I deactivate the little snitch rule and send the draft message for mail. This, he says, prevents me from sending attachmentless emails. And hence, he says, I don't get caught. Yeah, so so like I like that. And I'm sure his little snitch rule just stops mail from talking, right? That would be the simplest way to do that. I like that. That's good. There are workarounds potentially. Mail Acton has outbox rules, which can be applied by default or by a rule so you could have it automatically hold those messages for, say, 30 minutes or something where you could go in and edit them with with Mail Acton. The other thing that I've created with Mail Acton is a rule that says if I mention the word attach in an email, but there is no attachment, stop me and throw up a dialog box before I before letting me send that email off. And perhaps that would be doable with with what Graham's talking about here, something that says, look, if it's your accounting software, you know, some some line of text or some other thing that's consistent to all these emails, just if it has that in it, throw up a dialog so that you can go and add the attachment. So maybe it's worth worth checking out. Do you use anything like that, John, like Mail Acton or anything like that? No. OK. But it's a nice rule. I mean, I like that mail less I checked if you try to send a message without anything in the subject line. It's like, dude. Yeah, exactly. You're sending an email with with this blank. It'd be nice if Mail would reliably let you do other conditions. But yeah, well, you know, my little snitches is my pal. Yeah, little snitch is very powerful. I mean, you know, I've talked about how I use it when I travel to limit the things that my computer tries to do when in a hotel room. And it works really well at that because I have it at home. I just like when it's on my home Wi-Fi network, I have a profile set. Everything just runs wide open, so it's not pestering me all the time. But when I get to a hotel, I've got this set of rules that just limits some of my background apps that doesn't try to do backups and things like that that might, you know, slow things down. It works well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm tickled by the ability of finding out who's trying to phone home. I mean, especially with OS updates, it's interesting in that Apple will add new processes or create. Yeah, create new processes. But, you know, having it come up saying, oh, yeah, this, you know, new daemon is a demon. I don't know where I want to call it. I said before. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Demon, demon, whatever. But DAEMON is how this word is pronounced. And then there are holy wars bought online about or that's how it's spelled. There are holy wars fought online about how it's pronounced. So if you want to get into that, like, it's awesome. Just make sure if you're going to reply on one of those that you use V.I. because Emacs sucks. So there you go. You beat me to it. I was an Emacs guy. I know, I know. Emacs champion. That's the other holy war. You folks think that Mac and Windows holy wars online were reached epic proportions. I think nothing will ever come close to the V.I. versus Emacs debate that that's still. But I'll concur that Emacs is the kitchen sink of editors. Yeah, and that's what a lot of people don't like. I don't like V.I. or Emacs. Emacs, I use nano. So they. Oh, yes. What did I use last for? I think I use Pico. Pico is another one. Yeah, Pico is like nano. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, I'm hardcore, man. Ed. Oh, I don't even know if you can call it an editor. I mean, it has the words E.D. in it. Right. Yeah, I don't know, man. It's pretty, pretty bare bones. That's pretty bare bones. But, you know, it works. It works. It works in the. Chat room. I wanted to highlight Brother Jay said that mailmate, which is a third party mail application from Freron software. It's actually, I don't know that I've ever heard of this. He says that it has an attached keyword setting to halt outgoing messages as well. So so it can do this. This looks like an interesting mail client. It's I mean, I'm just looking at the feature list. I don't I can't see any screenshots or anything, but it says it supports open PGP and SMIME and all that stuff. So, yeah, interesting. And of course, if you want to join the Pina Gallery, which I say in the most positive way possible, sure. You can go to MacGigab dot com slash stream. I think that's where it still is, right? That is it stream. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's where it is. There you go. And Brother Jay says that mailmate is strictly for power users. So that's interesting. I'm putting it on the list. I'm going to check it out and stuff. All right. Chris chimes in with a helpful little tip for anyone that uses an old connected data transporter. He said I was generating lots of heat from the top of my head trying to work out why I no longer had access to my transporter library after upgrading to high Sierra and feared that all the long term storage I had placed there was gone. The files were still available on the connected data website. But he says this would have taken involved a lot of downloading and repositioning files to a new storage medium. Not fun. I'm aware that this is a storage system I should not rely on going forward, but Nexan has released a fix for those in the same position as me. And sure enough, there's a little high Sierra patch that we will link to, of course. And he says I hope it helps someone else out there. So thanks for sharing that, Chris. That's great. Again, we'll put that in the show notes. But Chris is right. If you're still using the transporter, I would. I mean, there I think support for it is well support for it's officially done. But and and there are other products that Nexan sells use the same online system. So I think the online portion of it, the sinking portion of it should work for a while, but I wouldn't I wouldn't rely on it. I'd move on to something else that's actually going to, you know, routinely see support updates and that sort of thing. You never know which update from Nexan is going to be the last for the transporter. So but kudos to them for getting this one out. It's good. Anything on that, John? Ah, my transporter kind of rolled over and died. So. Oh, there you go. Yeah, mine still works. I still have I still, you know, have it running on the network. And I think I have Pete's transporter here with an external hard drive hanging off of it. Interesting. Yes. Yes. All right, Tad asks a question. He says, Dave, you seem pretty pumped up about using Stringify. I looked into it and downloaded the app and it seems pretty powerful. But with all the account hacking and breaches going on these days, it was leery to sign up. Since the app is free, how are the developers making their money? Where does this fall on the privacy slash usefulness scale for you? So this is a good question, just as a quick reminder to catch everybody up. Stringify is an app very similar to ift where you can use. It's it's an iOS app, but it's also a service where you can set home automation type or automation. It works with home automation, but you can do other things too. You can set triggers to to kick off events. And if you if you've used if Stringify is the same, but more powerful. But this is a good question. And of course, the same thing applies to if as well as Stringify, right? That there are any other service that needs or wants access to your other accounts. The way these work is you say, OK, I'm going to log Stringify in to my Ring Doorbell account. Great. Now I can get some triggers from that or I can push some changes to that, depending on how you know what what the API supports. And then I want to log Stringify into my Hue Lightbulbs account. And again, same thing, like it can either give me some triggers or or allow me to pass some commands. And then you can use Stringify as the thing that wires these two separate systems together so that when there's a, you know, and I keep talking about it where there's a signal from my ring that says there's motion in the driveway. I want to turn on my Hue Lights and Stringify works great to do that. So the question is, what happens there? If somebody breaks into my Stringify account, you know, what can they do? Because now in theory, you've got access to my Ring account and my Hue account. And that's true in terms of you have access to the API that Stringify has access to. It doesn't store my password or anything. It's just doing authenticate, like open authentication. But still, you've got access to the API. So you could know when someone's in my driveway, when someone's on my back porch, when someone's at my front door, you can't see the videos because that's not accessible via Rings API. So I'm not worried about that. You could turn on my lights. And that's same as true with my Hue Lights. You could turn those on too. So I'm not that worried. I'm a geek. I like to, you know, I'd rather have the toys and play with them than worry too much about security in this regard. But any cameras that I have inside my house are not linked to a cloud service. They link directly to my Synology, and I use Surveillance Station on that. Right. And OK. And that way, you know, that never leaves my house. And actually, at the moment, I only have one one camera in the house. Actually, it's a it's a cool camera. It's a FOSCAM camera that that has a it's it's got motors in it so I can like swivel it and pivot it and everything. It's great. But that only talks to Surveillance Station on my disk station right now in my Synology. And I don't even have it recording video. It's just like I can view the camera and control the camera through Surveillance Station, but but it's not saving anything, which is how I want it. Yeah. Hmm. So, you know, so what you're trying to say. So so if I hacked, if I somehow figured how to hack your Stringify account, yeah, then give me access to other things. So you're saying I couldn't, for example, ring, which we both have. And, you know, think they're pretty neat. Like with my ring, I can see, you know, you can do a live stream of what's happening around the ring. Correct. I couldn't do that. Not via Stringify because that's not available through the API. OK. Yeah. Yeah. But if it was, you could, you know, and someday it might be right. And I won't get a warning from maybe I would get a warning from Ring saying, hey, you know, you're we've chosen to open up the live streams on, you know, our API. And here's all these apps that you've already wired up to it. Just make sure you want those to have access to that. I don't know if we're going to do that or not. Right. But they could. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. Not that worried about that. No, because there are pictures of the outside. They're from house out. Like the house is the only thing you can't see in the ring camera. Like, I'm OK with that. I mean, I guess if I run. And both of my cameras are. Well, one of my cameras is looking at my backyard and the other one on the ring is looking at a public street. So, you know, it's, you know, so what if somebody could see that? Right. That's kind of how I how I feel about it. Now, I mean, it could be argued that, well, if somebody can see that, they can figure out your address. And if they can figure out your address and, you know, all that stuff. Well, yes, that's totally true. For me, it'd be there are other other ways to figure out my address that are way easier than trying to hack into my Stringify account. Like, for example, simply looking up, you know, my name in the town that I that I that I mentioned at the beginning of every episode for 13 years. Like I like that that particular ship has sailed for me. People know where I live. So if you wanted to, you could probably figure out how much my house is worth. I mean, like all that stuff, like you just go nuts. And, you know, if that if that kind of thing floats your boat, then that's what you'll do. And maybe you've already done it. And that's OK. Like, I get it. I'm sort of the same way. Um, so I actually have to look into that because, as you know, yeah, I'm sure you're aware as our listeners that, you know, I recently switched my phone service from AT&T, which switched over to Frontier. Yeah. And I was in their directory and then I switched over to Optimum. And as far as I know, they offered to put me in, I think, their directory versus what we'll call the phone book. OK. Yeah. I mean, you search for my name and my town and you'll probably find my address. And if you want to stop by, that's that's cool. That's cool. Right. I'll just have to, you know, check you out with my ring before I let you in or, you know, call the authorities. Yeah. Your address as mine is is published on the Internet. I found yours on Benverified.com, just doing a Google search for exactly the same thing that you just said your name and your town. So there you go. Yeah. And I've got Warren in the chat room saying, Dave, I'm on your lawn naked waving at you. That's awesome. Unfortunately, I'm podcasting, so I just can't pull it up. But, you know, whatever, it's it's fine. I'm sorry to miss out. Kind of cool to be naked. It's awfully cold out there to be naked. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK. I like, you know, you know. Anyway, moving on to Colby, please save us Colby Colby writes. I have a 15 inch MacBook Pro from mid 2015, lots of 15s, running the latest version of Mac OS high Sierra. The past few times I have tried to run updates from the Updates tab in the Mac App Store. I've been running into an interesting issue. It just loads a blank screen with the copyright text and that stuff at the bottom. I try to refresh, but nothing changes. All the other tabs for the Mac App Store, such as features and purchased load as they normally would. However, if I try to open the Updates tab, the white screen with no options or even the update history shows again, I tried running the maintenance automation in Onyx to no avail. I tried reinstalling Mac OS using the Mac OS utilities reinstall Mac OS feature. This, however, resulted in the same blank screen. I find this interesting as the Apple menu states that I have six updates available. However, I don't seem to be able to access them at all. Do either of you all guys or other listeners know what could be causing this issue? I've seen this before, albeit not with the persistence that you're seeing there, Colby. I can't remember if it was a reboot or it was either a reboot or maybe a reboot into safe mode that solved it for me. I'm not convinced that's going to solve it for you, but I feel like that's worth trying. Safe mode is done by holding the shift key down on startup and we can put a link in the show notes that explains that in more detail. But that's basically it is hold down the shift key until you see it say safe mode and then you're good to go. This could and perhaps more likely be caused by a corrupt Mac App Store cache. And I don't know if Onyx addresses those. I don't think it does. It does not. It does not. OK, there you go. I'll tell you who does. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. Well, I remember. Well, we referred to this article in the past, but we're further again here, but I just found it here. So I was thinking the same as you. Yeah, I actually searched for App Store caches. And there's a dandy little article on Stack Exchange called how to fix, reset App Store app on Mac OS 10. OK. Now, it says for all cup of ton, but there is the gist of this article is that you go to your home directory, library caches, and then there's com.apple.appstore. OK, apparently that contains the cache file. So those, as we know, cache files and to give some further instructions here. But I think that's the gist of it. So as we all know, caches can get corrupt. So and I think I've had to do this one, not lately. I've been pretty lucky with with my App Store experience. Huh. Yeah. And Warren in the chat room, I guess he he put his pants back on says, I've seen it, too. Sometimes your clock being off causes it. So there you go. Really? Yeah. But, you know, I mean, who knows? It's it's a web view, right? So it starts getting wonky. It's just how that stuff is. It's kind of I think they do it similar to how iTunes Store works, too. So. And let's see. And you found that. No, I didn't find it. I put a different one in the show notes. I found one that also on Stack Exchange, but it talks about doing killing off four processes, Store Account D, Store Asset D, Store Download D and Store In-App D and then deleting the caches specific to those four processes and then restarting the App Store. So we'll put them both out there because either one is good to try. So good stuff, I think. Yeah, let's go to let's go to listener Dave here. And listener Dave asks, let me drop a time stamp. Otherwise, nobody will know where we are. I have a question about drives. I've got a mid 2011 iMac and it has a Thunderbolt port and four USB two ports. I know that newer drives external are now USB three. My problem is short of going for a new machine. I'm looking at some sort of an upgrade. I currently have three external drives, two are Firewire and one is USB for a total of two and a half terabytes. One of these is being used for system backup. I'm considering a Thunderbolt dock. How far back in versions can I go with a dock and will the Firewire and USB two drives gain any speed for data transfer through this method? I expect to upgrade to USB three external drives at some point in the near future. But at the moment, he says the drives I use are quite old. So yeah, this is interesting, right? Because I'm sitting in front of a perhaps exactly the same model iMac. It's it's a minus a 27 inch 2011 iMac. And that's what I used to record the show. I do use a USB three drive with it. And I do use that by way of a Thunderbolt dock. And I've used many different Thunderbolt docks on this machine over the years. At the moment, I've got a cow digit Thunderbolt dock on it. It's just a Thunderbolt one dock. That's all this machine supports. But but it certainly can can and does support USB three. It's got an ethernet port on it's got some audio ports. It's got I believe this one has an eSATA and an HDMI port. I'm not looking at the back of my apologies. But yeah, this is sort of the beauty of Thunderbolt, right? Is that it is your expansion bus. And you can add capabilities to your computer that you simply didn't have before. Things that that should be things that have to plug into the motherboard. But of course, since that's effectively what Thunderbolt does, then you get this out of it. So yeah, you can you can extend the life of a Mac quite a bit. In fact, I derail us for a second and we can come back to this, John. But I posted a thing on the Mac observer Twitter account last week asking people to tell us if their Mac was a year older, less two to three years old, their desktop Mac. I did the same thing this morning with laptops a year older, less two to three years old, four to six years old or older than seven. Sixty four percent of the people replying were more than four years old. Which is very interesting. Like these are and I asked about daily driver, like not what what's the oldest machine you have that you turn on sometimes. Like this is what's the machine that you use every day? How old is it? Sixty four percent of the people are using something four years older, older on a desktop. And it looks from even though it just started today, I think the same is going to be true, perhaps a little bit lower. Fifty eight, fifty nine, sixty percent using a machine that's four years or older and like 20 percent using a machine that's 20 years but that's seven years older, older, older, which is huge. And this is part of the beauty of that is is Thunderbolt makes these things expandable and upgradable in that sense. So yeah, good, John. I'm with you, man. Hey, you know, I got my MacBook Pro 2012 mid 2012, which in my humble opinion was the last of the great MacBook Pros. That's right. Is that a is that a retina screen or no? This was the last machine. So I thought very carefully when I got this. Right. But no, this is the last machine where all of I would consider the major components, including which I'll consider the battery, the drive and the RAM were all user serviceable. Right. Once they got past this one, the one following it, which was the retina, that's when they started making the machine less user serviceable. Right, right. Yeah. And it's it's still my daily driver. It's still, you know, it's got a quad core I7, you know, plenty of RAM. It I have the only thing that it does that's weird is if I started up sometimes, Hardware Growler reports thrashing of the HD, the FaceTime camera will say, connect, disconnect, connect, this and while it's having this discussion with the camera, anything else that's USB, such as the keyboard, I don't have access. So this is something that's been happening more and more. I don't know if I should. Yeah. Disconnect the FaceTime camera or whatever. But it's it's it's having a problem. It traumatizes the USB bus for several seconds. Then once the machine is woken up, then, you know, everything is great for the most part. Huh. Huh. Interesting. Yeah. It's it's fascinating, man. It's fascinating. You know, my desktop is, you know, the 2014 Mini, which maybe some day some people speculate they may actually update the Mini. I don't know. I think it'd be nice because I still think it's a nice machine for the money. Yeah, we had an interesting conversation on TMO's daily observations today. John Martellaro, Jeff and I about what that looks like. And it's worth listening to because John Martellaro also has some great thoughts on this. But I think the what really seems to be the gist is what does what do consumers see as as the defining characteristics of a quote unquote serious desktop machine? And and I think that's what Apple's going for with what will be the 2019 Mac Pro. So I don't know. It's interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Right. Onward and upward. Sort of unless you're using an old machine. You know, I used an 11 year old. I used an 11 year old iMac last week. Was it last week when my heat was out? Whatever it was last week or week before my heat was out. I used an 11 year old iMac to prep the show and it like it worked swimmingly. It's fine. So it's just interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So just double checking with our Pal Mac tracker. But yeah, so my machine was the last revision of the of the Mac mini. OK, right. Oh, yeah. So if they bumped it up. But you know, honestly, I got to say, Dave, if I had to do it again, I think I'd probably get. And I'm back. That has always been my my thing. Many times I have thought, all right, I need a new Mac for, you know, this person or that purpose or whatever. It's like, yeah, I guess it's desktop Mac doesn't need to be a laptop. Great. Don't need to pay the laptop tax. Awesome. Probably get a Mac mini. Then I start pricing and pricing and pricing. And it's like, whoa, for like 50 bucks more. It always seems like it's like 50 to 100 bucks. It's like, wow, I can get an iMac. Comes with a screen. It's a little bit faster. Yeah, I'm going to do that. That that's what that's what's happened to me every time. So yeah, I just appreciated the spirit of the Mac mini, which is like totally number one. It's, it's, you know, fairly inexpensive in the line of Macs. And I can hook up my own keyboard and screen and peripherals and stuff. Yep. Yep. But at this point now, I think the, you know, the screen on the iMac is wonderful. So, you know, why not go for that? Just make sure you, you know, you get enough RAM and screen to serve your needs for foreseeable future. Well, I mean, I've got two screens on this iMac and same downstairs. I mean, there's the built in 27. And then I've got another 27 sitting next to it. Right. No, yeah, you can you can plug another. You can extend the screenage. Yeah, yeah, it works. I mean, that works great. I I've always had that or not always, but for a long time. Once you once you get used to a desktop scenario with multiple screens, you don't you don't go back. It's very difficult. You just get used to having all that real estate. And believe it or not, I've only had it here in the podcast studio for a couple of months and already it's like I can't imagine going back and like cramming everything in on on one screen and having to the nicest part is being able to have just multiple windows up at a glance and not letting things get buried and that sort of thing. So at least for me, so. Hey, I want to take a minute, John. And I want to talk about our sponsor for this episode, which is Bare Bones. As I mentioned in the intro, Bare Bones is up to version two. Sorry, not two, twelve point one. And BB Edit, twelve point one. When I say Bare Bones is up to twelve point one, I of course mean BB Edit, their flagship product, their text editor. BB Edit, the cool part is you can just download a copy and use it. You don't have to pay for it if you don't need all of its features. And quite frankly, for many of you, you probably do fine with just the free version, which is of course sort of the point. They they want you to to be using it. And then if your needs go beyond the sort of actually it's it's very full featured set of features. If they but if they go beyond that, then of course, you know, you'll you'll upgrade because you you know how to use it and you love it. But it's really, really cool. And and version twelve brings some very important things to BB Edit. It is 64 bit native, which is cool. It has touch bar support. It has a dark theme support when you're using a dark color scheme. BB Edit's colors now match and the chrome matches. So it really kind of blends in and doesn't burn out your eyes when you're bouncing around from other dark windows. This one just stays that way. Very, very cool stuff there. BB Edit allows you to read and save files to your FTP or SFTP sites. The UI for that changed for the better in twelve. I mean, a huge way. And so you got to check that out, too. Very, very cool stuff like the thing is I use BB Edit every day. I'm always just putting text into it. A lot of times I'm using it to count words or to find text or even just to sanitize text when I'm trying to copy something from a web page into either an email or maybe an article that we're doing. You know, I'll copy it and if I just paste it directly, it inherits all the formatting and everything. I paste it into BB Edit by its nature. BB Edit just doesn't inherit any of that. And then I can sort of get it looking the way I want. Copy it, paste it into whatever app I'm using and life is good. So you got to check this out. Go to barebones.com and check out BB Edit. Download your free copy. You get all the features for 30 days and then and then you're limited to the free features that pass that. But again, for many of you, that's going to be enough or thanks to Bare Bones for sponsoring this episode. All right, Mr. Braun, let's move on. Let's move on to Bill because Bill calls us out on something that we didn't get quite right in the last episode. But I've got an answer for you, Bill. So Bill says in 703. I was listening while jogging this morning, couldn't wait to get home to try the keyboard shortcut to switch to a window that is minimized in my dock. The inability to bring up such a window has frustrated me for the past 10 years that I've been on a Mac after many, many years on a Windows system. However, my bubble was burst in disappointment yet again as the supposed solution of command backtick simply doesn't work on either my iMac or my MacBook Pro. Like your listener, I've always used command tab to switch between applications and have long used command backtake to switch between windows of the same app so long as all of the windows are open and not minimized. However, nothing I've found will pull up a window minimized on the dock except clicking on it manually to test the solution and he goes through his test and he is absolutely right. So any window that is minimized will be skipped when you command back tick through your active windows. And that's either as you want it or it's frustrating, depending on what you want. There's good news, though. I found a way to do it, John. The solution is keyboard maestro. Keyboard maestro is I don't I couldn't imagine running a Mac without this app now either. It automates a lot of things. I use it for my multiple clipboards and you can use it. It has a window switcher and an app switcher that you can invoke with a keystroke. By default on my system, the window switcher was bound to control tab. And it did indeed switch through windows that were minimized and brings them right up so you can blast right through that wall. You can also map keyboard maestro's window switcher to command back tick and have it take over instead of using apples. So so there you go. There's the magic answer and hopefully that'll that'll do it. So there you go now. So when when we answered last week, we were we were wrong. We got caught. But now we're uncaught or we've saved ourselves. So there you go. Do you use keyboard maestro yet, John? No, I this is it's one of those things that once you start, it's hard to go back like that. I feel like the future of automation on the Mac is in keyboard maestro's hands. And I would it well, part of me would hope that Apple would acquire it just to have it in house. And maybe they maybe maybe they will. Maybe they've tried and Peter said, no, I don't know. But like it would be like it would be bad to be running a Mac today. I think where you needed to do automation if you couldn't use keyboard maestro. So like there you go. Yeah, I just have such mad keyboard skills that there's no need. Yeah, it's not. You know, that's the that's perhaps the issue with keyboard maestro's. They've got a PR issue with their name because it's not just keyboard stuff. It it's doing all kinds of different macros. But yes, it's linked to the keyboard, but it's not that it's making your it's I mean, it can do like keyboard shortcuts and stuff like text expander in a way. But it's really meant it's a super powerful macro engine that can be triggered with keystrokes. But it's the macro engine that's the real power of keyboard maestro, not the fact that you can trigger it with your keyboard, if that makes sense. So now I get it. And I think another piece of software that's probably like that. I don't know if you use it, but Hazel is another one. It's like totally. What the heck is. What does it even mean? Hazel, right, right. And a lot of people that that just can't live without it because it does it does a wide array of nice automated tasks on your rack. Exactly. I just set up two new Hazel rules on this computer today. You know, I use it for our audio files, right? I save our podcast audio files to the local hard drive or the local SSD here. But. I and I don't want to delete them, but I also can't like just leave them there because it'll fill up the SSD pretty quick. So it was actually Allison Sheridan that said, aren't you running Hazel? Couldn't you just like automate that and have it move those files every two weeks? It's like, oh, yeah, duh. So that's what I do. And then today I added two more to grab some images and things that I create sort of routinely and wind up sitting on my desktop folder. It's like, yeah, take these and go put them over there and then remove them from the drive. So it's yeah, Hazel keyboard maestro. These are the things that automate the stuff that I do on my Mac. Do you use Hazel, John, or no? No. Oh, interesting. It can really be helpful. Oh, I know. I'm sure. I may revisit it at a point. If nothing else, I got to appreciate the name of the company, which is Noodlesoft, who doesn't love noodles. Everybody. I like noodles. Yeah, it's good. It's OK not to, but I love them. All right, let's let's go to Chris here because I think we have the opportunity to kind of talk about something that happens to all of us with the troubleshooting process from time to time. Chris says recently, my Mac mid 2012 13 inch non retina I7 stopped recognizing the internal SSD, which is an aftermarket OCC 480 gig SSD. He says I get a white screen for a very long time. Then the question mark folder icon blinking. I tried zapping the PRAM. I tried resetting the SMC. Didn't change anything. Oddly, if I put the drive in an external USB 3 enclosure, it recognizes and boots without issue, although it's a lot slower than when the drive is internal. The SSD also works in other systems in the USB enclosure. I haven't tried connecting it to an internal SATA bus since that's inconvenient and doesn't seem likely to not work. Additionally, the SSD is covered by warranty and I have suitable backups. It is also recognized and booted from a spinning disc I connected internally. What did change? What did I change that could have caused this? I have been working on another machine more frequently and shut this one down for a few days. This is very rare for it. I usually use it for weeks powered on sleeping with the occasional restart also probably not relevant. But I was at a higher altitude when I shut it down versus my home at about sea level where I am now. Is there anything else I should try before submitting a warranty claim to OCC? The internet recovery wants to install lion. I'd rather install high Sierra from the start. Is there any way to change or update this? Internet recovery, I don't think so. Well, no, but you can go into recovery mode and do the current OS. But anyway, back to this other thing. You know, this is weird. I get that I'm thinking when you say it also recognized and booted from a spinning disc that I connected internally that that is your MacBook that they recognize that disk. I feel like. I can't imagine. That this is a problem with that SSD. I mean, you and that's the thing is you've tested that SSD. It works. It seems like there might be something wrong with the bus in that computer. Is it not like it's when the drive seated in there, maybe it can't get the like the connector isn't quite right on the drive. OK, I feel like we're missing something obvious about the it only doesn't work in one place. And I so I don't think it's the drive. What do you think, John? You know, I recall us having people writing in indicating when they had issues with a drive in their machine. It could be as you indicated. The SATA cable. Right, right. I know there was a very specific case in the past where the SATA cable. Wasn't quite SATA 3 compatible in some of the older units. Yeah. Oh, right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So what my guess would be, yeah, I mean, isolating it. That's a place I'd look. Now, it may not be easy to get. Well, no, it may not be too hard to get to that. Well, I mean, yeah, wait, what's he saying? No, actually, there's a machine that I have. Yeah. Mid 2012, well, mine's a 15 inch, but his is a 13. But it could be a failing or flaky SATA cable in there. So it could be. So the question then would be, why did it work beforehand and what stopped it? Obviously, resetting the SMC does not fix this problem. I wonder if resetting the SMC called this caused this problem. Well, I think it could very well be this SATA 3 thing. Maybe for some reason, the SMC, you know, the whatever it is that decides how to talk to the drive was stuck in SATA 2 mode. And so it wasn't trying to negotiate the SATA 3 connection. But with the machine being off for four days, maybe the SMC got reset just by nature of the machine being off for as long as it was. And now you're in the scenario where it's trying to negotiate this connection that it can't. But yeah, I forgot about that cable issue where you can get a replacement cable. Right. Yeah, I think probably I fix it would be the place to go and find out other parts from them. What's this? I mean, cables like everything else in life eventually fail. Right. Well, yeah. But I think this one wasn't this one that like the cable was just not capable of doing it. I don't even think it was. Right. Right. I mean, it was something about the cable that just wouldn't let it do SATA 3. But but in either case, yeah. That I feel like that's that's where I would look first is is at that. You know, you've got a warranty on the drive. You've got backups. If you've got the time, it's not going to, you know, it's only going to waste time to have them replace the drive. But I don't think that's going to solve the problem. That's. But it's a weird one, you know. I see why you would jump to the drive. But I don't think the drive is the issue. I mean, I think you've ruled that out. So yeah. Yeah. On the funny drives with funny messages doing funny things. Front, we have Bill who says recently in the last week or so, one of my three external drives has started generating disk not ejected properly messages. I can't think of any settings I changed in this time frame. They appear to be occurring while the screen is turned off. I tried changing my system preferences. Energy saver setting for hard to sleep from not checked to checked. Same symptom happens overnight. There can be 15 to 20 of these messages generated when I come back to the computer the next morning. It's a five K retina iMac from late 2015. Thirty two gigs of RAM, three external USB drives, each with two volumes USB three drives. How do I stop these messages and the behavior that causes them? I've I've seen this. I see this occasionally on my computer. John, I run full time with an external drive connected where I keep my photos library and some other things. So this is, you know, if anything interrupts that connection, I hear about it. And this happens, you know, maybe a couple of times a month, but it stopped happening after I pulled the cable out and plugged it back in and kind of positioned the drive to where the cable is not being stressed at all. And that did it. Like it has a knock on simulated wood grain or something here. But that it has not recurred since then. So I would think, especially since you haven't changed anything and you haven't done anything to the drive, I think we're either looking at yet another bad cable or the controller on the drive or maybe the drive itself is beginning to fail and you're seeing it take itself offline and come back. And it's not the drive that's issuing these error messages. It's Mac OS. I think you realize that. But just for everybody listening, it's Mac OS that generates these messages saying, hey, that drive was connected. It wasn't ejected, but it went offline and now it's back. So that's Mac OS saying, I'm not happy about you taking that drive away from me without ejecting it first. That's essentially the error message. And of course, you're not taking it away, but it is going away. I would if you've got three drives, I would reposition this one in the chain and see how that works. And perhaps if you've got a different cable that you can try on this drive, I would try that too. Thoughts, my friend. I concur because I actually recently had an enclosure that would do pretty much the same thing. The the cable. I think it was the cable. The cable just wasn't. Quality or defective or had a short or something as a brother Jay in our chat room suggested. Yep. So get another cable, get another enclosure. And I'm betting this will go away. Yeah, I don't think it's a drive problem. I think it's either an enclosure problem or a USB cable problem. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious if you see this happen during the day when you're working on it. Because if not, then maybe there's a sleep issue with the like the drive itself, which seemed like the path you were you were heading down or maybe another drive in the chain or another device in the chain isn't dealing with wakes from sleep properly. I don't know. But finally, another USB port. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that could be too. Yeah. I mean, USB ports kind of like out sometimes. Yeah. You know, I would reset the SMC on this Mac as well. That well, you know, that seems to be the theme of this episode. But resetting the SMC. No, it like whenever there's a weird hardware problem, that's the first thing you do, right? Because when it's hardware, but not hardware, it's the SMC, and it can certainly lead you down the path of believing you have a hardware problem. But if this is truly not happening during the day when the machine's in use and is only happening overnight, then that starts to make me feel like this might be not a drive or cable issue that the Mac just isn't sending the right signal to the drive to to make it do the right thing so that it's there when when the system wakes up. Like that's it's worth trying, especially if it's isolated to never happening when the machine's awake. Like if it's a cable problem, you're going to see that error. You know, at all times, not just when the machine's asleep or unattended. Right. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Hey, in our pre-show chat today, John, I want to I want to goad you on here because we were talking about Bluetooth and and you had some some strong words about what Bluetooth is. Do you remember what you said? I think it's a hot mess. That's what you said. Yeah. Yeah. So why like, why do you say that? That I mean, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I'm just I'm just trying to it's just. We've gotten so many questions about. You know, especially when you get in the scope of multiple devices and priorities and I just don't think Bluetooth was really very well thought out. I mean, the intent was to have a low cost, low bandwidth, low battery channel for you to talk to things. Right. Yeah. And then, you know, we have, you know, of course, not Bluetooth, Ellie low energy. So I get the intent of it, but it's just that the the the number of times that we've heard people have to wrestle with it to get it to do what they want. Again, especially with multiple devices. I mean, you don't have this problem with Wi-Fi. You can load as many people as you want within reason on a Wi-Fi access point. And everything's fine. But we just keep getting questions that, you know, it doesn't talk to car play and it doesn't, you know, connect to this and the audio quality stinks and I mean, they've improved it. But still, it's I mean, what are they at now? Is it 4.0, I think? Yeah, well, 4.2, which is the low energy stuff. But Bluetooth 5 has been announced and, John, it's going to solve all the problems. Just like just like Bluetooth 4 was going to. Yeah. Yeah, it's I don't disagree. 4 gigahertz, you know, just like Wi-Fi or certain flavors of Wi-Fi. So it's, you know, it's a, you know, 2.4 gigahertz spread spectrum RF protocol, but there's just it just saddens me that people have to keep wrestling with it to get it to do what they want, whereas I don't see it as the case with Wi-Fi and other wireless protocols. Yeah, that's just my take. No, and I think the the interesting part about Bluetooth is how little control we users have over it, right? Like with Wi-Fi, you go into the router, you can go nuts, like changing settings and you can you can actually create yourself a hot mess if you really want. Whereas Bluetooth, it's all peer to peer, plug and play. You know, zero configuration is really the buzzword I was looking for there, where it's just like, oh, yeah, it just it just works. Don't worry about it. It just works. Low bandwidth, right? That's presumably the reason for no carplay. But, you know, we do. We always have problems getting Bluetooth things to pair. And you said something interesting in the pre-show that if if Steve Jobs was still around like Bluetooth is a thing that he would attack. And it what it what's interesting is how Apple without obviously Steve Jobs has been dealing with Bluetooth because things like the AirPods work really well and really reliably, like, scarily so. My kids just got AirPods, right? They each got a pair. And within, you know, seconds of opening the box, their AirPods were paired with their phone because what happens is you open the AirPods case, which powers it up and sends out the Bluetooth signal and your iPhone's like, hey, do you want to pair with these AirPods? And you say, yeah. And then that's it. Like, you don't have to go through the normal pairing process or any of that. Well, I was at CES. I talked to a little birdie who told me how Apple is doing this. And what they're doing is they're putting the Mac addresses of every Bluetooth device from Apple Mac, iPhone, iPad in a database and auto pairing the AirPods with them. So because Bluetooth still requires like both devices to have each other's Mac addresses, like you have to go through that Bluetooth thing. But that W one chip sort of skirts around this by just populating all those things in there. And then it's like, yeah, OK, no problem. Like we got you. It's, you know, it's prepared is what it is. And that's really interesting. I mean, it's a terrible workaround that it's terrible that that workaround has to exist in order to improve the Bluetooth experience. And yet that's exactly the workaround that does exist because you don't have to put it in pairing mode. It just is like, hey, it's all good. And even once you've paired them with a phone, like if I open my kids' AirPods near my phone, I just flip it open. It'll offer it to be like, hey, you want to pair with this phone? It's like, whoa, no, but thanks. I appreciate the offer and they just work. So Apple has been getting creative with it. It's not a long term solution. It's certainly not an industry wide solution that they've come up with. But it works for the AirPods. But but but I think that highlights how imperfect and broken Bluetooth actually is, you know, to me. Yeah, no, I'm with you. And if you want to explore the brokenness of it, I have two suggestions. OK. So one, again, from our distinguished brother, Jay of the chat room, there's something called Bluetooth Explorer that is part of the optional additional tools for Xcode. But I found another tool called Light Blue from Punch Through. You've mentioned this before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. And they've so between the two of them, I think the Bluetooth Explorer from Xcode is a bit dated. OK. But Light Blue is, you know, Punch Through, I guess they do Bluetooth consulting and development and stuff like that. It's it's a nice tool and I've used it when I've had to debug Bluetooth problems. You know, shows all the devices near you and you can dig in and get all of the details and stuff like that. So, huh, cool. Yeah, I don't disagree with you. It's a it's a hot mess. I mean, I like it is so and perhaps this is the problem because it's so crucial to to the way I use my devices right now, right, without a without a headphone jack like on my phone. I use AirPods when I just want to listen casually or I want to talk on the phone. Right. So that has to be Bluetooth. I mean, I could I could get a plug in thing. But that's, you know, remembering the dongle and all that. It's just Bluetooth even at its hot mess level is still more convenient than that, in my opinion. When I want to come up and play my drums, I have one of those. It's an old thing, but I don't know if it's available, but there are things like it. It's called the it was called the SmartBean from a company called Antec. And the what it is is it's a Bluetooth receiver with a headphone jack on it. So you pair it with your phone, then I can plug in whatever headphones I want. And I just clip the little SmartBean on my, you know, on my shirt or whatever, and then I can play my drums along with with music that I can run from my phone, but I don't have to run a cable there. It's just Bluetooth. And, you know, I do the same thing when I'm traveling. I bring a Bluetooth speaker with me at home, obviously. I have Sonos, so that's not Bluetooth and it it's reliable. But it's always a little bit janky other than with AirPods. It's always a little bit janky, even in my car, which is I use Bluetooth in the car for many things. It pairs with my radar detector from Escort. It pairs with my car itself for both phone calls and music. Right. I mean, it like Bluetooth is a major part of my life with my iPhone. But other other than the AirPods, every single one of those interactions I just described to you is janky. That sucks. Yep. I mean, the only thing, honestly, I use Bluetooth for Dave is I don't really use it for any audio. The only thing I use it for is to enable a handoff. Sure. Yeah, sure. The SmartBeats available on Amazon, by the way. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. I didn't realize it was still a thing. But I have no reason to use Bluetooth other than that Mac OS and iOS rely on it to to talk to each other. Sure. But you you might find reason to to use Bluetooth. I mean, you you're your thing is all my audio, Dave, all of my audio, whether it be AirPlay or the Heos, Denon, yes, that I have are all over Wi-Fi. That's Wi-Fi. Sure. And, you know, and they work fine. I've never had any sort of streaming audio streaming issue with any of those devices because they're all on Wi-Fi. Because it's Wi-Fi. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For most people, I think it's fair to say that Bluetooth is probably a part of an important part of their iPhone life. But yeah, and it's frustrating seeing it not just just just be janky enough that people are always like, just give me the cable and I'll plug in or what, you know, whatever. Yeah, shouldn't be that way. But hey, like you said, five is coming out. They'll probably get it right eventually. Oh, yeah, no problem. Yeah, good stuff. Uh, you know, where does that put us here? John, I think that puts us at the at the end here. That's just how it's got to be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's going to be we got a lot of questions left, but that's OK, because you know what? I saw on the schedule, we're doing another one of these next week so we can answer some of the questions then. Really? Yeah. Oh, I'm standing. Yeah. Hey, if you want to join the the live stream and join in the chat room with us and all that stuff, we do this and generally we do this at five. We meet at five fifteen p.m. Eastern time on Mondays these days. That's our that's our time slot. It does sometimes change. We always publish that to a calendar at Mackiekev.com slash calendar. You can subscribe there if you want. So just go to that link and it'll offer to subscribe on your phone or on your on your Mac, whoever you do it. And and then you join us at Mackiekev.com slash stream. And we have a blast in the chat room and it's it's actually a whole lot of fun. So we would we would love to have you here. But in the meantime, we need to fill up the queue. It it already is kind of full, as I said, but we're going to fill it up more from you. So feedback at Mackiekev.com is how you're going to how you're going to get your questions to us. Yeah, I'm going to have to wag my finger at you because I really think people should send an email to feedback at Mackiekev.com day. Yeah, or feedback at Mackiekev.com also works. In addition to that, all three of those, the fourth option, if you are a premium contributor slash subscriber, premium at Mackiekev.com is what you can do. So so that that gives you lots of ways to get us. And we'll leave it at that because we told you about the chat room. We told you about this. It's all good. We don't want to overload. There's there's options we'd love to see in the chat room. It's a lot of fun. We stream the audio, of course, and and we have we have the back channel happening there. So it's it's interesting. It's a little bit crazy because we're, you know, doing this and managing the agenda and answering your questions. And then, you know, occasionally, like just paying attention to the chat room. But it's great because it allows us to get real time feedback while we're doing the episode. We don't have to wait a week. Usually, you don't have to wait a week to offer some corrections this week. We did. But, you know, things happen. Yes. And after all these years, both my esteemed colleague and I have managed to manage our ADD so we can kind of pay attention to all these things that want. Oh, really? Yeah, not really. No, not really. I want to thank Cash Fly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I want to thank all of our great sponsors, of course, Barebone Software with BB Edit. Smile at SmileSoftware.com, Otherworld Computing at MaxSales.com, Roboform at Roboform.com. We've got some more coming that I can't wait to tell you about. I hope you all have a great week. I hope you all have a great time this week. I hope none of you, not a sink. In fact, for all of you, what I hope is that you don't get caught.