 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, Episode 708 for Monday, May 7th, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap. We are the show that takes your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We mix it all together, try and form a cohesive agenda that we sometimes stick to. The goal being that we're going to answer your questions, we're going to share your tips, we're going to share your cool stuff found. We're going to share some cool stuff found of our own so that we can all learn at least five new things each and every time we get together. Yes, it's five. For those of you that are just joining us from 2017, we've up the ante. We've come up, I guess we increased it by 25 percent. Is that right? Or is that just 20 percent? See, that's no, it's 25 percent increase, is it? Right, because we were at four. Going from four to five? Yeah. Yeah, 25 percent of four is one. Yeah, yeah. So that's that's how it's going to be. Sponsors for this episode include Smiles PDF pen version 10, a new one that adds watermarks, custom headers and all kinds of stuff. We will talk more about that in a minute and also a new sponsor for this show. Simple Contacts. We're at simplecontacts.com slash MGG or using coupon code MGG. You save 30 bucks off of your first order. This is a cool service. I can't wait to tell you more about it here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here and pollen infested Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John Efron. Yeah, I was noticing that the plants all went poof last night for us here. Probably earlier for you, probably a week or two ago, right? For you, but up here. The trees are raining their seed upon my property and my vehicle. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is the season. And they're doing what they got to do. It's how it goes. That's right. I do want to say and I know this is I didn't say this in last week's show. So many of you might not hear it, but I'm speaking in Princeton, New Jersey tomorrow night, Monday or Tuesday, May 8th. And all are welcome to the. It's a PMUG dash NG NJ rather PMUG dash NG dot org. So I just wanted to say that I've tweeted it out and I've put it on Facebook and stuff. So hopefully folks know what I like to say in the show and I missed it last week. So I think our buddy Kenny is out there. Maybe he'll stop by. I think he's yeah, I think he's further out than that. I don't think he's too close to Princeton, but who knows? I do know some listeners are coming and I should be fun. So it's always a good time. They're a good group there. What are you even talking about? I have, yeah, I've sort of revamped my my almost decade old running your Mac lean, clean and mean presentation. And so I'm doing it as a run your Apple devices, lean, clean and mean. But really what I'm doing is showing people a lot of tips and cool stuff found that they can use on both their Macs and iPhones. So, you know, it's good, it's fun. Shall shall we get to the show here, my friend? Yeah, why not? All right. Well, we will start here with Joe. Actually, let's start with some some cool stuff found tips, whatever you want to call. I guess this is cool stuff found. He said my apologies if I missed this. But back from Makikab 703, you were talking about geotagging in photos. He says, unfortunately, I would hazard to guess that the majority of DSLRs out there do not geotag photos. He says, I just spent 800 bucks on one that does not geotag. He says, anyway, in photos, you can do it. And we talked about that where you select the location and you can you can do that. But his cool stuff found is an iOS app called geotag photos. And he says, this iPhone app keeps a log of my location while I'm shooting with my dumb DSLR when I import my photos to my Mac. I use the companion app to geotag the photos and update the metadata, adding the geolocation information based on the timestamp that my iPhone had at the time. So that's a pretty cool thing, right? Because your iPhone can know where you are and it can also know the time. And so this geotag photos app correlates the two and will auto populate with at least the location of your iPhone at the time that the picture was taken, which if they were both on your person is pretty darn close to exactly where it's going to be. It's pretty good, huh, John? That is not surprising, though, because my it's not a DSLR, right? Call it a point and shoot, which is an icon, but it does have GPS. So really? Yeah. Yes, pretty good. Now, you have to activate it. And I think it's not on by default because it does draw a small amount of power, even when the camera is is technically off, I think. Sure. Yeah, because it's got to keep its keep its place. So yeah, but but I do recall when I was looking at DSLRs, I do believe some DSLRs have a GPS add on if they have like an access report. You may want to look into to see if there's an option like that. Cool. I mean, there's also the, well, I think their day has passed. I mean, I remember back in the day, the the iFi card was great. It was using Wi-Fi. That doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of cameras have baked some version of that in using Wi-Fi for geolocation. Right. So we want to poke around your camera and see if either of those are available. Again, with mine, it was off by default. But I turn it on because I do like to have those coordinates most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. And then Jan has yet another solution for electronics that have overly bright lights on their faces that bother us. He said, I have a tip where the light actually gives off a status indicator that you might want to see sometimes. So instead of covering it up, you might want to have the option to see it. He says, what I do is I use one of those webcam covers like I would use on my MacBook or iMac. He says you can get them from Amazon for a few bucks. And I put a link to to one of them that I found a three pack, actually, in the show notes and they stick right on. I mean, they're built to stick on your MacBook or your iMac and they have a little slider so that you can cover or not cover your webcam. But obviously it could also be used for these lights and you could slide it back and forth so that you can see the lights when you're troubleshooting and then slide the cover closed when when you're finished. So I like it. Pretty good. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. So thank you, Jan. Cool. Very cool. In fact. All right. Any thoughts on that, John, before we move on to Slick? Yeah, I know. It's good thinking. Yeah, a little better than a than a tape. A little more stylish. Yeah, a little more functional. Yeah, there you go. Cool. All right. Another one, another cool stuff found rather this one this time from listener Ken. And I will find it. I know. There it is. Ken says it says. I hate when I search for a specific word in messages on my Mac. It shows lots of text, but it never highlighted the word. So for me, it's very hard to find the word. But I found a Mac app called Chatology made by the folks at Flexi Bits. He says it was more expensive than I thought at 1999. It won't allow you to respond to a message because that can only be done with iMessage or with the Messages app. He says, but it definitely does what I wanted for searching. And that's indeed what Chatology does is really gives you a powerful archive to your archive utility to your for your all your iMessages can search them. And that's really what it's it's made for is searching and hunting and finding. So it's pretty cool. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. I have I I feel like I tested it a couple of years ago, but I don't use it regularly. But I had forgotten about it until I got Ken's note. And then I was like, oh, yeah, there's times when that would be really handy to have something that will be more intelligent about searching my iMessages and text messages. So yeah. Cool stuff. You got some cool stuff found this week, John. More cool stuff. I did. Yeah. So I was out shopping. And we're not going to tell you about my mower that I'm having a problem with because that was the initial reason I went to the store was to get a spark plug for it because it's not working. So evidently, you are going to tell us about the mower that you were having a problem with. No. Well, I just did. That's what I'm saying. But that's it. But we're not going to diagnose why lawnmowers don't work here. I've been through this. But while I was in the store, I was like, you know what? I just got this new Wink Hub two. And I was in Home Depot and one of the products when you run the app. So there are two parts to this environment here. One, of course, is the hub, as I mentioned last week. And then the other part is their app. And the thing is you can look in their app to see what devices they natively talk to. And one of them, which I thought was cool and I thought I try out because it's not terribly expensive. Cree makes what they call connected smart bulbs. And basically, the electronics for doing all the smarts are built into the bulb, which is why is an LED bulb that costs about 15 bucks versus most LED bulbs. Right now, I think you can get for like a buck or two. Yeah, right, right, right. Well, so because of the smarts. Cree's bulbs are generally more expensive than your average LED bulb. Anyway, they they they have the reputation of having higher quality parts. And so, you know, that so they so you will pay more for a Cree bulb than you would for just a regular run of the mill. Like I'm talking about their non-smart bulb equivalents, you know. Yeah, yeah. So but yeah, still, but I decided for a smart bulb is is cheaper than you'll pay for like a Philips Hue bulb. So that's pretty good. Yeah. And it's also why, at least in this particular store, I go to all the Hue bulbs have the tamper the device that screams if you cut the wires and try to run away with it. OK. Because I guess they are rather pricey compared to this one where this one's just in a box. Sure. But here's the nice thing about this bulb is that so they advertise it. So one, I saw that it appeared in the in the Wink app. So I'm like, oh, let me pick pick one of these up here. If you go to their page, they tell you that. Oh, well, hey, our bulb works with Wink. With ZigBee. With smart things. And with Wiimo. So it's just compatible with everything. Well, doesn't that essentially. Essentially they're all ZigBee, I think. I was just going to say, doesn't that mean they're all ZigBee? Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's right. But still, that's great. Yeah. But it's cool. So, you know, I went into the app. It's like at a new device. It's like, OK, I'm ready. And then what you do is you screw the bulb in and the Wink. Cubs sees the bulb appear and it's like, OK, you want to give it a name? And it's like, yep. And so now when I talk to my A friend, all I say is turn on table lamp, which is what I have the bulb screwed into. And it turns it on. And I can say set the brightness to a value between one and a hundred. And it does that. Cool. It's just pretty cool. It was just so simple. I mean, it just, it worked as easy. I mean, it worked as easy. I mean, it worked as easy. I mean, it worked as easy. I mean, it worked as easy. It just it worked as it should. That's great. Hey, I don't think I'm going to go full bore on these because I mean, I don't think I'm going to replace all my bulbs with $15 LED bulbs because that gets kind of pricey. I mean, look at dimmers next to replace my dimmers with smart dimmers. So that's interesting because listener Robert wrote in and it was in response to our conversation last week where he said that we were talking about the lifespan of the bulbs, right? And he says, when they mentioned the theoretical 20 or 30 year expected lifespan, they're actually referring only to the calculated, of course, not measured lifespan of the LED light source itself. He says, however, all common LED lights are DC powered. So to use them in a standard lamp or light fixture, there is an AC to DC voltage converter stuffed inside the base of the bulb. Basic electronics tells us that the converter consists of discrete components such as a transformer coil capacitors and or resistors. And the quality of these components varies a lot from the brand name LEDs to the no name ones. So when the converter fails, the light will fail even though the LEDs themselves might be good for, you know, 20 to 30 years. He says, and that's not even factoring in the possible inclusion of like a ZigBee or potentially even Wi-Fi radio in, you know, a smart bulb. And then he goes on. So the thank you for that part of this, Robert, that's awesome because I knew, because with my personal experience, these bulbs, like I don't think I've had an LED bulb last five years yet. So they just tend to burn out. Yeah. Because I have, but I have had catastrophic failures of CFLs. Right. But that's very different. That burned and smoke came out. I literally saw the smoke coming out of it. And that was kind of scary. Yeah, that's bad. That's potentially mercury filled smoke. You don't want that. But yeah. So I've had like the converters or whatever. I mean, you know, those LED bulbs get hot with those converters in there. But then Robert goes on to say, one of my pet peeves as a smart home integrator is the predisposition by consumers to buy smart bulbs instead of smart switches. So this is just what you were just saying, John. He says there are some trade-offs, but the majority of the time smart bulbs are the dumb choice. And he's written a blog post about it that we're happy to link to here. And so I asked him what smart bulbs he recommends. And he says, sorry, what smart switches he recommends. And of course, the reason for this is if you've got, say, you know, four bulbs in your living room all tied to one switch. Well, you could replace all four of those bulbs with smart bulbs or you could just replace the switch. And then that way, A, all you're doing is paying for the switch and using the bulbs you already have. And B, you don't have to do what John and I have to do in our homes and put those little switch covers over the switches that are now controlled by our smart bulbs so that people don't flip them on and off accidentally. So he says, I really like the Lutron, both the Cassetta and the new Radio RA2 Select. He says for the Cassetta, the key is to avoid starter kits and buy the Pro Hub only, which is sold a la carte. He says it's got a Telnet command line interface and it gives you max flexibility. It works with the Lutron app, with HomeKit, with the Amazon A lady, with the G lady, and with smart things. And he says, although the Radio RA2 is sold only through dealers, most electricians will have them. So I'll see if he can give us, and perhaps this Cassetta one is available. I'm literally reading this email. I didn't prep it for the show. I just, as we got into this topic, I remembered. So I grabbed my phone. No, I saw it. It's good stuff. So you got to do a cost-benefit analysis. Right. Should I pay 50 bucks for a smart dimmer, which I'm going to venture that's about what they're going to cost. Or, yeah, like in my case, for example, so I got six bulbs in my kitchen. Do I want to spend 60 bucks on bulbs, or do I want to leave the bulbs that are in there there? Yeah. And maybe spend less than that on upgrading my switches, which for at least that room are just simple on off switches. Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. And you're right. It's about 50 bucks for a switch. So I will find one of these. And this is more. I'm going to put it in the show notes, but know that this is unvetted only because we're kind of doing this in real time here. So. Yeah. But it's there. So there you go. Yeah. And then this led to a question. And then, so I noticed this and I fond about this on my Twitter feed, which went to my Facebook. And that I like the attention to detail that the Wink app has in that it'll show an icon for the different bulbs that I have, Dave. And they're kind of like on the Mac, the icon represents, I forget what this is called, but the icon accurately represents what the bulb looks like. Okay. So I have these older GE link bulbs. Yeah. And it shows me an icon that looks like they do. And then the Cree bulb, it shows an icon that looks like that one does with, you know, the cutouts. And I was just like, that's really neat. And then our buddy Kenny asked the question, which is a good question. And I think it was a good question because I wanted to clarify what I was saying. And he's like, well, oh, this Wink thing sounds pretty neat. Could I use Wink to implement a home kit? Well, no. What he asked was, can you replace? Yeah. He was using his iPad as his home kit hub, right? And which you can do, right? You can designate. Well, is the iPad the hub or is something else the hub? Well, the iPad is the hub. So you can designate an iOS device. I think it has to be an iPad. I don't know if a phone will do it. But it's iOS devices. So an iPad, an Apple TV, which technically is TVOS, or HomePod, right? So one of those things. And what that allows you to do is control your home kit devices remotely. Otherwise, you don't need a home kit hub. You can just control your home kit devices from your iPhone when you're in the house. But if you want to control things remotely, you need some device to be that gateway, right? Between the outside world and the inside world. And so, again, if you've got an Apple TV or a HomePod speaker on your network, they will automatically become that hub. Or you can designate an iPad to do it. And I would say plug it in. But then that will be your hub. So he was asking, you know, with this Wink hub that John was talking about, would that replace the home kit hub? And the answer is no, not for home kit purposes, right? It serves a very similar purpose, although it does more than that, right? So the home kit hub is just for the, for like timing and scheduling and all of that stuff because you've got a device that's there. But it's not, it's like... The word hub is being used interchangeably for these two products. And it's not really, they're not doing the same thing. The home kit hub does what we just described, remote access and like scheduling and things like that. Whereas the Wink hub is the gateway without which you cannot talk to your smart bulbs, right? Because they speak ZigBee and you don't have any other device that speaks ZigBee. You have a device that speaks, say, Wi-Fi. So the Wink hub is the translator between ZigBee and Wi-Fi or ZigBee and Ethernet, you know, and I'm oversimplifying here, but that's essentially what it's doing. So two very different things. It also happens that the Wink hub connects to the internet so you can control your Wink bulbs remotely, but it's still not home kit. I mean, and arguably Wink, the Wink hub might be more full-featured than what home kit can do. In fact, I would actually make that argument, but yeah. I mean, the similarity between the two is that you have a hardware device kind of doing a translation between whatever language... That's where there's no similarity. That's the one thing where they are not similar because you don't need a home kit hub to talk to home kit devices, right? You need the home app, right? You need a home kit device and an app that speaks home kit, which the home app does, but there are many others that do as well. Yeah, it's like the home kit devices are sort of, you know, they stand on their own, but there are things like the Elgato stuff or the Belkin thing, like Belkin makes the Wemo home kit bridge now, which does exactly what you're talking about, but that's not a home kit hub. That's a home kit bridge. The hub is an Apple-only device that lets you remotely control and have a device there for scheduling home kit stuff. It's very confusing because we've got these words that we're interchanging and manufacturers are interchanging, but they're not doing the same things. So yeah, there's no translation happening with the Apple home kit hub, but with the main hub, there's definitely translation, right? Because that's what it's doing, yeah. Yeah, if I had any home kit compatible devices, then I'd know more, but I'm glad we're having this discussion because I'm sure I'm not the only one that's confused and I just decided because nothing that I have right now, as far as I know, I mean, I've run the home app and, you know, it's like I can't find anything that talks my language and I'm like, okay, whereas, like I mentioned before, I have things that I know are already compatible with Wink, so that's the direction I took as far as my, we'll say smart home architecture. Can I say that? Yeah, I think so. So it's the Wink Hub, the Wink app, and through the Wink app, not only can I, you know, turn things on and off and stuff like that, but it also lets you do things like scheduling. Like one of the features it has for lights, it's like, hey, you want me to do this to kind of make it look like there's somebody living in your house thing? So it'll like randomly like turn lights on and off and like different rooms and stuff to make it look like there's somebody at home. That's good, cool. I may try that when I, you know, when I go on vacation or something like that, just for kicks. So as Warren in the chat room correctly points out at macgeekab.com slash stream, some home kit devices do need an in-between, a bridge if you will, and that's what we're talking about with the WiIMO stuff or some of Elgato stuff. You need that bridge so that it can talk to, you know, the devices that can't speak Wi-Fi on their own. That's really what it comes down to, is it needs to get connected to your network. And so if the device can speak Wi-Fi on it or Ethernet on its own, then it can work just fine directly with HomeKit, otherwise it needs its own little translator. But again, that's not, you know, the scheduler or it could be, the manufacturer's schedule. That's where it gets very confusing, right? Because you can have, like right now in my house, I have, I've got the Philips Huebulbs, which are HomeKit compatible, but also, you know, compatible with the A-Lady and the G-Lady and all that stuff. And also compatible with their own app. I have the Ring stuff, which is not HomeKit compatible yet, but yes, compatible with things, with like the A-Lady and the G-Lady and its own app. I have a couple of TP-Link smart switches that are Wi-Fi capable, so they don't need any ZigBee or anything like that. They just speak to Wi-Fi. But they only work, they don't work with HomeKit either. It's like their app and then, you know, A-Lady and G-Lady. And I think that's all I have. But it gets really confusing, because it's only one of those things. The Huebulbs work with HomeKit. So it starts, it's like, well, why in the world would I want to use HomeKit unless you're starting from scratch and don't have anything that's not HomeKit? And then, you know, maybe that starts to make sense. Or if you want to be a real geek, you can set up something called HomeBridge, which is actually pretty easy to set up. And what it will do is it runs on your Mac or you can run it on like your Synology disk station or something. And HomeBridge is an app that runs in the background and translates between your non-HomeKit devices and HomeKit. It provides essentially an interface to let HomeKit talk with non-HomeKit devices. So if you have smart bulbs, like for you, John, with the Wink stuff, it would basically tell HomeKit, hey, cool, I've got some additional Huebulbs here. And then HomeKit could talk to those. So you could set up HomeBridge. And actually, you probably have fun doing it. It's really not. It's not a huge chore. But anyway. I think I tried to, oh, what's that compatibility thing on Synology? Docker? Docker. Yeah. I thought there was a Docker package. And I tried to activate a couple. And it just, the Docker is, I'm not pleased with Docker. Docker is something that is actually way easier to do from the command line than it is via Synology's web interface. It's just. Yeah. I mean, I got the Docker package. So it's a package through Synology, like all the other, most other things you add. Yeah. And then it was like, oh, well, here are some Docker plugins that'll deploy this thing called HomeBridge. And I'm like, okay. But number one, they were like, oh, you got to manually edit this text file and put all these special values in here. So it's going to work. And I'm like, oh man. Yeah. Yeah. It should just work. You know, it should prompt you for this info. I shouldn't have to fiddle with a text file. So actually, Kenny's question, could I use Wink to do HomeKit? The thing is, if you want to fiddle with HomeBridge, I would not recommend it. No, it's really confusing. So yeah, you know, at this point, and I find myself in these conversations with people a lot, my advice is don't go with HomeKit because you'll be confused as to what you can buy. I mean, I know you can buy all the stuff that's made for HomeKit, but it gets really frustrating for the average consumer to manage that, to be perfectly frank. It's way easier to go with like, you know, A-Lady or something like that, where you've just got, you know, tons of availability of things to work with. Yeah, I mean, if you're starting off, look at the various vendors, whether they be Wink or SmartThings, or Apple has a HomeKit page, I'm sure, that says, okay, here's all the stuff that we work with. And I think the list is growing every day. Well, now that they've changed the... But I think the other vendors have more... the other guys who have been doing this longer than Apple. And if working on the standards and all that, have more options, I would say. Though that may change, you never know. All right, we will move on from this. Tips. Staying with the tips here. Okay, so David from 707, which I will find here, we talked about Fios routers and what to do with them. And specifically, the question was, could someone use something like an Eero as the main router for the house and not have the Fios router do the routing? And so the answer is, yes, it's complicated, but you can make it easy. And we've got actually several emails from many of you. Specifically, David, Bill, and John really were the three who kind of pulled it all together. So, Bill, I think, said it best, I think, where is his email? Oh, I got this huge PDF here. Bill said it best. He said, all you really need to know is three letters, D, M, and Z. And what you do is you set up both the Fios router and the Eero, both in normal routing mode, because putting the Fios router in non-routing mode requires a huge amount of configuration and also some specific sacrifice, like you can't control your TV guide from outside the house and there's some things that you will sacrifice. So, all you need to do is just leave them both in router mode. You will create what's called a double-net scenario, which we always say is bad and that's why you hear John like sucking wind in through his teeth. Yeah, exactly. But the reality is the way things, the way networks work today, DMZ isn't really nearly as bad as it, sorry, double-net isn't nearly as much of a problem as it used to be and where it is a problem, you can bypass and the way you bypass it is by setting your Fios router to point all unrequested, unsolicited inbound traffic to your router. Which it would be getting anyway if it were your main router, it would all be coming in. So, you just tell the Fios router, look, anything that comes in that you don't know what it's for, just pass 100, instead of ignoring it, which is what it would normally do, pass 100% of it along to that device there and then that's going to be your Euro or your Synology or whatever router you want to use, Netgear could even be an Apple, right? And you tell it to do that and then that device gets all of that traffic and it can be your router and it can do all your port forwarding and everything because it's getting all of that unsolicited traffic and that process is called DMZ. It's the demilitarized zone, you are saying, fine, we are essentially turning off the firewall and flooding all the traffic one way and it's to that device and so you DMZ that device and like that's the advice for people with Fios. There is a great, if you want to go and do the nutty thing and actually disable routing in your Fios router and lose some functionality with your TVs, you can and Allison Sheridan and Bart Bouchotte put together a great PDF about how to do all that but you're better off just doing the DMZ thing in this day and age. So there you go. Yeah, as Brother Jay says in the chat room, unconditional traffic forwarding is another way to think of the DMZ. It just takes everything and routes it right to that one device and then it's up to that device to actually do the routing which is what you want. So there you go. Good. Yeah, John. I look forward to the day when I can get fiber. Yes, you and me both, man. Today is not that day. No, today is not that day. Listener John actually sent in on this same topic. What he sent us was a link to dslreports.com which is a great website for like geeky router type things. It's one of my favorites and it's about the Fios stuff and it's a chart that shows you the trade-offs between all the various configurations that you can do. Again, our recommendation is just go with the DMZ. However, if you don't want to do that or you want to know exactly what you're agreeing to and not agreeing to and all that stuff, this dslreports page is awesome. So we'll link to that in the show notes. They are good folks there at dslreports. Good, John. Moving on. I'm waiting. What are you waiting for? Waiting for the world to change? You know, I should just stop waiting and I should just connect something to the fiber router that's on the pole next to my house. I should just stop waiting. I should just get a ladder and just climb up there and I'm sure I can figure it out. Yeah. I mean, you would also need to purchase service. It's not like the fiber is just... Well, you know... Routable from the... All I know is when I moved into my house I just had cable running into it and there were several channels that I was receiving and I wasn't paying them anything yet. That's very different from internet service. But you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's pretty standard that you can get some level of cable on a non-provisioned line. I mean, as far as internet connection, I mean, just find an unsecured Wi-Fi access point in your neighborhood. There you go, man. Before we move on to other things. And this is from Ken. He says, for a long time I've been looking for a keyboard shortcut to open the trash and I found it. But the only way I can figure out how to do it is with keyboard maestro. And so he did, right? He created a keyboard shortcut where it opens the trash with Command-Shift-T. Any program keyboard maestro to do it. I share this, not because we all want to find a way to open the trash. I mean, that's a pretty specific request. I rarely dig into the trash myself. But it's just yet another reminder that keyboard maestro is at the foundation of all this automation on the Mac right now. It's really, really good stuff. So thank you for sharing that, Ken. I like those kinds of things. All right, John, I want to talk about our two sponsors here. If that works for you, my friend. Of course. Our first sponsor for today is Simple Contacts. So, you know, time is of the essence these days. And going to the doctor, I don't know how you feel, but I'm not a big fan of spending my time in doctor's offices. Obviously, there's times when you need to go to the doctor. But if you can avoid that and still get everything done that you need to get done, then that's even better. It's even better if you can save money in the process. And this is what Simple Contacts allows you to do. So if you're someone who's already wearing contacts, you generally have to go for a vision test before you can get more contacts. Well, Simple Contacts takes care of that for you. And I did this, right? My wife, Lisa, she wears contacts. And, you know, it's always a pain in the neck. Oh, yeah, I got to go for the vision test so that they'll, you know, let me order more contacts, which is just how the regulations work. Simple Contacts does it in an app, either on your phone or you can do it on your computer. And the vision test is actually overseen by an ophthalmologist. And, but the difference is it only costs 20 bucks when you do it with Simple Contacts as opposed to, you know, upwards of 200 bucks if you're going to the eye doctor. And it only takes five minutes in your house. With Lisa, we did it with the phone. We set up the phone on like a chair that said, walk back 10 feet, tell us what letters you see. And then like the whole thing is, is then sent off for confirmation so that they can, the doctor can look at it and say, okay, yeah, yeah, you're good to go. And then you're good to go. And then you get to order contacts from the service. And the prices on these things, at least it was shocked looking at the prices. And again, this is like I said at the beginning of the episode, simplecontacts.com slash MGG. She thought what she would be getting is like generic versions of the contacts that she wore. You scan the barcode and they go, no, you get the actual, she was shocked when we opened the box. I'm like, of course, it's the real thing. So you got to check this out. Go to simplecontacts.com slash MGG and then use coupon code MGG. That will save you 30 bucks off of your contacts. And then the eye exam is just 20 bucks. Now, to be clear, this isn't a replacement for your periodic full eye health exam. That you will still need as often as you would need it. But in terms of the vision test, 20 bucks. And then you save 30 bucks off your contacts with simplecontacts.com slash MGG. Coupon code MGG. Great stuff. Our thanks to Simple Contacts for sponsoring this episode. Our second sponsor for today, John is Smile with PDFPEN 10. Can you believe it? They're up to 10 versions of this thing or the 10th version of this thing. PDFPEN is the ultimate tool for editing PDFs. I use it all the time. Both on my iPhone as well as on my Mac, it just makes it super easy to do whatever I need to do, signing documents, populating things, marking things up. It just makes life super easy. And PDFPEN 10 now adds watermarks, custom footers and headers and a new precision edit tool. You can move images around without increasing the size of your document. You can magnify library items. If you've got like your signature in the library or your name or whatever. And it adds batch PDFPEN Pro 10. That is adds batch OCR support so that you can totally go paperless much easier now by making a whole collection of scanned PDFs searchable. So check it out. Visit smilesoftware.com slash podcast and check out PDFPEN 10. Really great stuff. Great company over there with Smile. Our thanks to the folks at Smile and smilesoftware.com slash podcast for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Let's move to David. This is a question I get a lot. And David asks, very simply, he says, I've been subscribing to iTunes Match since day one and to Apple Music when it first came out from Beats. But I'm confused. Why am I paying for both? Do I need to? I've read on Apple site that Apple Music now includes Match except for streaming on old Apple TVs that I no longer own. Spoke to an Apple rep who said I would lose all my DRM free music. I have two or three copies of all my music and I listened to Apple Music in my car on CarPlay and on my iPhone and on my HomePod and on the two 5K iMacs that we have. Less so since they got the HomePod. Makes sense. He says, so do I need to pay twice? I'm a little miff that Apple aren't clear about this and I suggest millions are paying for services they don't need or use. The shorter answer is I don't believe you need to pay for both. If you have Apple Music, you don't need to pay for iTunes Match. I had iTunes Match. I had it when I signed up for Apple Music because it was 25 bucks a year and my subscription did not expire on the same day that Apple Music started. So I had them both for a couple of months and then I canceled iTunes Match when my renewal came up and I still have all of all access to all of my DRM free music through iCloud Music Library and everything works very, very well and I see evidence of that all the time. There was a day where I couldn't like it was last week or something where Apple Music sign-ins were failing maybe it was two weeks ago and I didn't have the same music that required Apple Music and Apple Music license but I could still play all of my DRM free music that I had that I had imported and it was like that part was no problem. So yeah, I don't think you need iTunes Match. I think you're all right without it. You don't use either, right John? Correct. Okay. Moving on to Kevin. I'm curious to see where this one goes now John. Kevin says I got on sale a Kinex My Drive aka the Me Drive. There was some naming conflict. He says the thing was $12 marked down from 80. It connects to a USB hard drive and allows it to be used like some sort of network drive. It's supposed to support both SMB and WebDAV but I've only ever gotten WebDAV to work and with the Finder it works off and on. The thing obviously has some issues otherwise they would still be supporting it but I digress and that's why you got it for $12. He says anyway the thing is when I try to copy files to it from the Finder it just sort of hangs yet if I use the terminal and copy things that way it works no problem. After some research it appears there's some problem with the WebDAV implementation in the Finder. It can read and copy files just not to it. Do you know what's up? I can't find any information other than it doesn't work. Is there some reason for this? So yes I'm sure there's a reason for it. I think Apple just built the WebDAV client that way to be read only. Well let's step back here. What is WebDAV Dave? Yeah go ahead. Well I think in a nutshell WebDAV is using HTTP which is the protocol that gives us the wondrous web web. And if you want to dig down a bit you're probably talking either on port 80 which is insecure or 443 which is secure HTTP and it's using HTTP to transfer files. Is that a description of what WebDAV essentially is? I mean it stands for web distributed authoring and versioning is what WebDAV John F. Braun ladies and gentlemen that's awesome. I tell people here. It's awesome. The nice thing about WebDAV is that almost any firewall or router allows traffic on ports 80 and 443 which is great. So if you got a client that supports that well then you got a home run. In this case though I suspect because it was a questionable device here. I suspect that their WebDAV stack sucks. Well I have heard about Finder issues with WebDAV too. The same very thing he's talking about the writing it does not write well to WebDAV or consistently or reliably but we need an alternative. Correct. You got one? I got one. It's my favorite. Cyber Duck. It's been around forever. Cyber Duck is a multifaceted file transfer utility and it supports all sorts of standards including WebDAV but also FTPS SFTP two different kind of flavors here. But Cyber Duck supports a lot of supports all these standards and when I've had a need to do direct protocol operations with one of these file transfer options I use Cyber Duck so that's one of them but I think you have one or two as well Dave. I do. It may be more robust than the alternatives. Maybe. I haven't used Cyber Duck so I can't speak to its robustness but I have used Transmit from Panic and that works great. And like Cyber Duck it does all of the things you just mentioned WebDAV but also FTP in every flavor and way I like it because I can have Windows saved and so there's a lot of times where I need to FTP essentially sync a folder from my computer to an FTP server and I can sort of have that saved as a thing and it just comes up and I don't have to think about it and it's all right there and I don't get it wrong so Transmit's one option and then I found another one from the folks at Eltima called Commander One which they say is a free dual pane file manager for the Mac and they say that it supports WebDAV I have not tried it but there's two things I like about it and number two that on their page the icon for built-in file viewer is the machine that my grandfather invented so I always like that they've got a nice icon of the Tower Optical viewer machine there so there you go so you can check that out too good? yeah? sweet all right moving on to Eric where are we Eric find you here Eric writes Dear overlords of Mackland okay I'll take it fine are we uh benevolence maybe? no no no because the overlord kind of has a negative connotation that's just I don't know we have to embrace our overlordness you know like being the merciless it's just not nice people there have been some bad overlords but you know maybe there have been some good ones and they just don't get a lot of you know a lot of play in the history books because that's not interesting you know you try to convince some 10th grader to learn and they say well this was a good guy over here what did he do? you know whatever the people wanted and kept everything running good oh okay but then there was this other one you know so it's a little more interesting anyway Dear overlords of Mackland we're using discut... we really don't know if Eric intends this to be good or bad overlords so we're applying our own prejudice here so we're just going to leave it at this one more time Dear overlords of Mackland when using discutility to erase or format a flash drive that will be used by several different Macs and PCs what format scheme would you recommend so I always go with it's a great question because I always think I always stop to think about this every time I'm formatting a flash drive so I would I would go with the format of MS-DOS FAT and the scheme of Master Boot Record that's what I always go with we're talking flash drives not hard drives not you know SSDs you know which are also flash media thumb drives really is the right way to delineate this and it's MS-DOS FAT Master Boot Record but as we have all heard my esteemed colleague and good friend Mr. John F. Braun feels like maybe there's something not right about that advice so go I think there's better advice so if you look in the format menu you will see the suggestion that my esteemed colleague made which is MS-DOS FAT which stands for file allocation table and I think that is actually FAT32 okay there's another choice EX FAT alright which is newer okay the only problem I have so the thing is for the most part I would say FAT32 or the choice that you mentioned I think for the most part is good enough the only problem and I remember we had somebody back in the mists of time talk to us about this the one limitation that you have with FAT32 is that you're limited to a file size of 4GB a file size right because I think it's doing yeah I believe 2 to the 32 because it's using 32 bits for some operations comes to 4GB is that right I think that's right okay anyways there's a limitation in FAT or FAT32 so you may want to consider if you're working with large files to work to do EX FAT instead huh alright and the option should show up in your menu I don't believe it's showing up in the menu on my machine because I installed something optional I'm curious if you see it as well Dave yeah no I think it was there when I when I did this I don't have a flash drive plugged into this computer right now so I can't test it but yeah I you know the reason that I went with FAT is I get a lot of flash drives right of varying sizes these days generally you know one gig on the low end and I mean routinely I get 16GB flash drives right thumb drives I've never seen one of them formatted to anything other than this MS-DOS FAT and so I that's kind of where my you're right though I mean if you're working with large files you're going to run into a brick wall if you if you haven't formatted this way but I guess I guess what I'm trying to think is would there be any compatibility issues on the Windows side with using XFAT and probably not I did some surfing and the indication that I got is that EXFAT is a better cross-platform choice than FAT alright well there you go there you go that's the advice then XFAT it is yeah I try and make sure that your devices speak it I mean they should I mean any device that you know like for example the SD card in my digital camera is right now formatted as the regular FAT not the EXFAT right because photos are you know not going to be larger at least in my lifetime than 4GB so there's really no need although if you were using your DSLR to shoot video which a lot of people do not every DSLR would but right I mean they're entire movies that have been shot on DSLR video so it you know it's possible you got decent lenses and all that good stuff so yeah XFAT's what 12 years old now so I mean that's pretty new in file system you know parlance or so 12 years but yeah there you go so people are saying that Vista sometimes doesn't like it but also that Vista doesn't like a lot of stuff so bear that in mind yeah yeah there you go Vista all right Jurgen has where are we on time oh all right cool plenty of time Jurgen has I skipped Vista a question a lot of people did yeah as a question that seems to come up usually around this time of year it says I'm trying to find a router with a certain capability what I want to do is the following when traveling I want the router to be able to connect to an existing Wi-Fi and establish an internet connection with that so we'll call that Wi-Fi 1 so you're in a hotel room you want the router wirelessly to connect to the hotel's Wi-Fi and then he says step 2 is that I want the router to create another Wi-Fi which we'll call Wi-Fi 2 that I then can connect my other devices to the result would be me being able to use the internet connection with my devices connected to Wi-Fi 2 and there's some security benefits and such to doing that so what you want is something that I think I would generically call a travel router and they do exist they generally only exist at the 802.11n level I don't know why that I mean I guess it's just for cost your hotel Wi-Fi is not going to you don't need to go huge ranges with AC or huge speeds because your hotel Wi-Fi is not going to give you huge speeds anyway so there are a couple of articles that I'll put in the show notes here but really it seems like the best one to get is I want to make sure I get this right I'm pretty sure it's a TP-Link 1 no no sorry it's the Hutu wireless travel router and it's available for 20 bucks TP-Link has one too that'll be in one of the lists but it's based on everything that I was kind of going through and crisscrossing and mixing and matching all the feature sets this Hutu 1 very specifically says that it can bridge an existing wireless network and create your own secure Wi-Fi which is exactly what what what Jürgen wants to do here so there you go 20 bucks at Amazon oh alright would I'm just wondering so TP-Link you caught my attention because I have one of their extenders would one of their extenders scroll? because it's not going to act as a router you need something that's going to act as a router network the TP-Link 1 is the N300 but I'm not entirely certain that it will do what what Jürgen wants I don't know that it'll grab Wi-Fi and then create another Wi-Fi network it will grab Ethernet and create another Wi-Fi network but so that's why and it's 35 bucks instead of 19 I remember back in the day I used my airport extreme for that sort of thing only but again that wasn't oh no you could could it create a separate network or was it just doing WDS and echoing essentially creating like your own little quasi mesh I'm pretty sure there was a way to say login to this other access point and then you have a different name and then let me talk to you so we kind of mass the fact it would kind of mass the fact that because a lot of hotels they'd be like well you got to pay per device and it's like it used to be that you had to pay per device that's right yeah less so now alright well my device is the airport express right right right full due I still remember that we would do that when we were back in the day when we were economizing it's like hey I'll share this internet and then everybody can hop on my access point it was so much fun well yeah and you can do it with your I mean if there is Ethernet and you have an Ethernet port on your MacBook which not all of them have of course then you can you can share your internet connection that way too is you know you can create a network right from there so so we will put links to all of those in the show notes and we'll take it from there alright we got a couple more things I don't know exactly where we're going to wind up we went kind of long on the home stuff I do want to take a minute though and thank all of our premium subscribers that contributed this week like I always say it because it's always true we couldn't do this without you and I and that's true of everybody that listens and contributes questions and all that stuff obviously we should call out your name when you send in a question and that's both in just to specify but also in appreciation because you help us create the content for this show so we really appreciate it we also appreciate our premium subscribers who send in financial contributions right to the show and so this month or this week rather on the $10 monthly plan we had contributions from Olga P Jason A Bob P Michael L the B-Man Abdullah B no relation Paul M Mike C Mark R Dave C Neil L and of course Bob over at Working Smarter for Mac users we love Dr. Bob we love all of you so thank you to all of you who contributed it's really great on the part of the show of Lou R Wayne B Doug A Chris F Scott R Ed T David B Craig R T David S Robert S and Andrew W thanks to all of you so much for what you do it really makes a huge difference here all right John are you back I thought it was a switch on your microphone I actually plugged USB device into my hub mm-hmm yeah sorry about that we heard that yeah okay you know this sort of came up I mean it came up in pre-show because I put it there but I wanted to have a conversation and while we're on the whole home thing about Tivo and Comcast X1 and the real reason is I was having this conversation with a client and I've been a Tivo household basically since they started doing it my daughter is 18 and a half this summer and so we will have been Tivo customers for 18 years we bought Tivo six months after she was born when we realized we wanted to be able to time shift television so that we could watch on our schedule because her schedule was not compatible with what we wanted to do so we've been Tivo customers for a very very long time and we've lived through the transition from having well we started with one Tivo box then we went to multiple Tivo boxes one for each TV or whatever to sort of the new paradigm of Tivo which is that you have one box in the house on which you pay your Tivo service and all of that stuff and for us that's a Tivo bolt and then we have Tivo minis on the other televisions that all feed from the data that's on the bolt or stream from the internet if you want to stream Netflix or whatever because it does all that too and really Tivo was as far as I was concerned the only answer for doing this other companies had come out with things obviously different cable companies had their own options and there were other stuff but the user interface was awful and on those things and Tivo really kind of had it it reminded me of the old days where and this may be hard for some of you to believe but there was a time when Windows computers were way more popular and Apple stuff was seen as like for toys for kids to use but those of us that used the Apple stuff knew that it was a way better interface and all that stuff so kids you can ask your parents about it about all that if this seems like totally foreign to you but I felt the same way about Tivo right it was like we tried some of these other things and when we initially tried the Comcast DVR that was the time that my kids got to learn the F word because they heard daddy say it over and over and over again to the television so you know it was a learning opportunity for them and they learned proper cursing technique but that's not necessarily the mindset that you want to be in when you're trying to relax but the other options sucked and I think that's what I'm saying though I know they got a lot better the one that you mentioned from what I've seen I haven't mentioned it yet no it's okay and so anytime someone would ask I would say well yeah Tivo and I would always back that up by saying even if we had just finished having the worst month that we had and we didn't have any extra money in the budget and our Tivo died today we would just go out and buy another Tivo because it was just the only way right that's not true for me anymore I don't think I would do that because you know your Tivo is going to cost you somewhere in the three to five hundred dollar range and then you're either going to pay fifteen bucks a month for the service on Tivo or you're going to pay somewhere in the two to four hundred dollar range for a lifetime Tivo service and that's the line I drew in the sand is that every Tivo that I've gotten Dave and also my family both my sister and my parents I bless them or showed them the way and we all have lifetime I'm with you if it wasn't for them offering a way to go from my series three to the bolt and transfer my lifetime I'm not sure I would have their latest unit sure and that makes sense and they're always willing like if you are a Tivo customer with a lifetime on a box and the box dies or something call them there is always a path you'll have to pay something but there's always a path to migrate your lifetime stuff around but I even with that you know you're looking at and then you and then for the Tivo mini boxes those are I think one hundred and fifty bucks piece so it's very easy to spend a thousand bucks to get your house with Tivo and that's a lot of money and so I don't think I would do that if and when my Tivo box dies I don't know that I would get another one at this point I think I would go with Comcast's X1 service which provides a lot of the same type of functionality my only big problem with the Comcast thing is that it's obsessed with showing me live TV at all times we have it so the cable package that we subscribed to here comes with an X1 box so they were like you don't need it because you have Tivo well then can I get money back every month for that they're like no give me the X1 box I want to test it out so I have I've got it in the bedroom I use it very very infrequently but it works the user interface is fine similar to Tivo it's got voice control things like yesterday afternoon I just wanted to see what was going on with the Bruins game because it was like the last game or it turned out to be the last game in the series or whatever and so trying to find the game that's on and navigating and having to type with the remote Bruins and hunt around well I don't with Tivo in the voice the box remote I just hold the remote and I press the button and I say Bruins and boom shows me the game that's playing and it lets me just switch to it right Comcast X1 has the same type of thing I can just say it it's got one passes and all that stuff and it's got remote boxes so I could feed the rest of my house with all of the Comcast X1 stuff so it's really I just wanted to share this because we've talked a lot about Tivo over the years now I haven't lived with X1 as my main TV it might very well be that if the Tivo died today we would jump to the X1 and then a month later say oh this is awful and jump to you know back to Tivo but for someone that's starting out start with the X1 or if your provider I know Comcast is I think I think the most popular provider in the in the states here but see what your providers got to offer you know I mean for the scenario I just described it would cost me like 20 bucks to test the X1 for a month well you know that's way less than a grand so so there you go and brother Jay is asking when is the Tivo listening without your knowledge to my knowledge both of these remotes only listen when you press the voice button on the remote I mean these are battery powered devices so if they were listening all the time the batteries would die very very quickly and they don't so I tend to believe them when they say listening when you push the button so so there you go those are my thoughts on that John did that answer your question I think so yeah and cable vision or whatever you want to call them this week optimum cable vision sure Altis I think is now they got acquired by but they offer a similar virtual DVR my only discomfort with that is that I kind of like having the content on what I consider my hard drive because you get some flexibility with what you can do with it well so you're assigning a fee a lack of feature that I don't think is accurate with the X1 you can do the cloud DVR thing but I I thought it was saving that content locally too Oh right I might be wrong about though I'd like to know yeah I could be wrong perception I get with a lot of these virtual what I'll call virtual DVRs is that none of the content is stored with you but I could be wrong because I haven't worked with any of them yeah it's just again it's my perception I thought I had a 500 gig hard drive in it but I may be misinterpreting that I mean that that would be my only caution with non-tivo devices is is you know if your net connection is gone can you still watch your stuff of course in the case of the Tivo where it's on the hard drive of course you can you know if it's like Netflix or something like that then you're out of luck so that's a concern with any cloud service if your network connection goes away sorry Charlie unless it's replicated locally yeah I might be wrong on this John it might be totally cloud DVR and that you get 500 gigs of cloud storage with it now when we say cloud though we're not talking about internet based cloud necessarily I mean it is but you're getting it in a different way because it's coming direct from Comcast so it's it's not using your internet bandwidth to do this I don't think for people that are interested I mean I used my mad Google skills here and I just did a search on Comcast X1 DVR local storage and the first article that comes up is called X1 DVR storage versus cloud DVR storage and I'm not going to read the article to you but if you want to learn about it and I'm going to read it after we're done with the show and see what they have to say about it because apparently I'm not the only one that has that question yeah no it's a very good question yeah yeah yeah interesting huh alright well I'm looking quickly here oh yeah no it is there's a based on what I'm reading here there is a hard drive in the thing okay and then there's cloud storage too so huh okay alright well yeah and Michael King is confirming that in the chat room that it has a hard drive built in so yeah that's what it felt like when I was using it it was very you know yeah felt like it was local that's the best I can say yeah yeah so there you go alright and the only thing with Tivo Dave especially with the bolt yeah they should have the shape annoys me the shape is so that it doesn't have to have a big loud fan running all the time because it the shape keeps you from it's not square right it's not square so that you can't stack something on top of it and overheat the components including the hard drive well you would like less if the thing had a big honking fan or the hard drive burned out your circuitry you know twice a year right yeah and actually now that you mentioned it I think we talked about this before Eero took a similar design approach the Eero device discourages you from putting something on top of it because it's curved and not flat that's true I think I read that in one of their documents they're like don't put something on top of me man I kind of enforce this with physics yeah right yeah I'm gonna make it very difficult if you put something on top of me it will likely fall off yeah or a cattle come along and knock it off you know yeah let's go to Chuck here let's see how we do Chuck asks he says I upgraded from a late 2013 27 inch iMac to a late 2015 27 inch 5k iMac with a 1 terabyte fusion drive in it he says I've noticed a few things that just feel sluggish when switching from app to app for example sometimes when I click on the finder which I always have open on a second monitor there's a spinning ball for about a second before it's responsive another example is if I click on the launch pad icon it takes a few seconds for it to be responsive I'm guessing this is because it's a fusion drive and not an SSD which is what I was used to so I started looking at maxsales.com and for some reason it doesn't come up with a listing that I would recommend an SSD internally if I did which one would you recommend also would I be better served increasing the RAM instead so here are some things to talk about and I skipped over this part of his thing but an external SSD you know removing and replacing internal drives in an iMac is often not the best use and risk to your machine with Thunderbolt or even USB 3 you can you can really get a fine experience that for the most part is no different from the experience you would have with an internal drive just using an external drive and boot from that so if you choose to go the SSD route either a USB 3 or Thunderbolt external drive would almost certainly make you very very happy and keep you from having to rip your iMac apart and then you could continue to use the Fusion drive for extra storage and doing that I'd probably go USB 3 just because you probably don't need the relative speed increase for Thunderbolt and you can avoid the Thunderbolt tax because there's money involved there and reviewing USB 3 I think last I check is 5 gigabits per second yep right and Thunderbolt is on the order of tens of gigabits per second but with a single drive you're not going to hit the speeds right right so yeah that was just why I'm with you the other point I want to make is that and I saw this especially when I got the so I had the 2014 mini yeah Apple puts crummy crummy rotational drives in their machines always have yep yep so the first thing I did when I got this they actually put a SATA 2 drive in this machine and do this has a SATA 3 interface and it was a SATA 2 drive it was locked the SATA 2 and I'm like you're gone and I had to put that SSD in there and it was like night and day yes sorry no no it's totally fine fine no problem let's see so the you might be right that this is an SSD thing versus a fusion drive thing but I'm not convinced of that I've used a lot of machines with fusion drives and you know unless there's a problem with the fusion drive I'm not seeing sluggishness just moving around in the finder or anything like that you know what I mean it just like I that I don't think that's your issue if it is then reinstalling the OS fresh would most likely fix that or at least identify there's a problem somewhere but I don't think that's the well I I mean you got to quantify I mean so the spinning ball is a good piece of data yeah but you're going to want to either get activity monitor or something like I step menus and that you may have a bottleneck somewhere and those are the tools that are going to help you identify where exactly that bottleneck is is it because you don't have enough for RAM you know yeah I mean if it's not enough RAM then you want to check your page in and page out and you know all that great stuff and just see what's happening there yeah I am nearly certain his problem is would be solved by increasing the RAM he says really because he he says he's got 8 gigs of RAM I mean 8 gigs is I don't know do you find it do you have a machine with with 8 in it John my mini has 8 and my mini which is the newer machine has 8 and my MacBook Pro which is my daily driver and as the older machine actually has 16 okay okay and I've I find it out 8 I think is a bare minimum these days yeah for any machine yeah I just don't like moving around in the finder seeing a spinning beach ball that's just weird to me I like I'm not I don't in that case see that as an issue you know I'm wondering because we've had I mean what it sounds like is he's moving from app to app it's not just that he's clicking the find a second finder window it's moving from whatever app he might be running and we and we don't have that data here but it's possible Chuck is running Ram hungry apps I mean if he's let Safari run for more than 24 hours that's one you know but maybe he's running things and doing you know some video editing or photo editing or something but this sounds like that whole swapping thing where you know when he switches from whatever app he's in to another app aka the finder then it like there's that lag of let me catch up here and do that which is why I really like my gut just says Ram all day long on this yeah I mean the other thing could be caches you know how much we love caches totally true yeah some caches so you may want to do a safe boot you may want to and actually yes we got a suggestion from from the chat room check your memory pressure in activity monitor yes so memory pressure I think is a non quantifiable value but the thing is if it's or it's a dimensionless I'm not trying to think exactly what you call but you can get this information memory pressure the thing is memory pressure if it's too high that basically means the system is doing a heck of lot of work doing memory compression and stuff like that so that it's trying to avoid swapping so checking that value right and you can do that in both activity monitor or last I checked you can do it in I step menus as well oh yeah that's right I step menus will it show mine right now I'm looking so the pressure on my mini here is 44% which I think is fine because it I think that's fine okay yeah I don't know working for me yeah yeah yeah huh yeah so like I said you know in another way to test maybe you've got some app running in the background that is causing trouble so start up in safe mode and see what that you know does it respond any differently it's tough to work for any great length of time in safe mode and you will notice potentially notice graphics being slower like screen redraws and things like that in safe mode because it doesn't generally load the faster graphics drivers there but but anyway there you go where are we on time do you have John do you think we can do Andrew Andrew we can do quickly all right well then let's go cool all right well let me dive in that we both answered it but and Andrew has a question and he says hi I hear the motorcycles coming coming up and down your street yeah it's like it's like mad max out here okay oh that's crazy yeah no it's warm and biker rather right and scooters and all sorts of people are I don't know what what's up with them all right so anyways hi Dave and John do you have any suggestions for 128 gigabyte to 256 gigabyte internal ssd to be used in a 2009 X serve you may ask yourself what the heck is that kids kids at a moment here right I would like the best performance with great reliability plus will it require a separate app to turn on trim considering that the X serve is still running Mac OS server for 10.6.8 so going back in history here X serve was Apple's entry into the rack mount server market and it was a pretty cool machine and actually back in the day I actually had one to play with as someone working running a data center and playing with servers and stuff but here's the answer well Dave had an answer and said Dave said I had good luck with SSDs from crucial and and OWC and they kind of cross pollinate yeah and then you said do you have different advice John so I do have some different advice here just just to be clear because I know most of you don't have X serves this is you know very generic advice for adding an SSD to an older Mac as well any any of these things certainly that I've suggested and I think what you're going to suggest are you know very generic for for older Macs so yes but I do have something specific for this machine of course anyways looking at the specs this machine came with even though it was in 2009 came with a SATA2 interface and SATA2 is 3.0 gigabits per second so it's not the latest standard the latest I think is SATA3 which is 6 gigabits per second but so you're going to want to make sure that the SSD that you choose supports that at least SATA2 though the caution I would enter is that we have had people tell us in the past you may want to up your cable game because sometimes if you have an older SATA2 cable and it's talking to a newer even if it's talking SATA2 and it's a SATA3 device weird things may happen but then I did a little more digging Dave and as far as the brands I mean I think anybody who's been in business for more than 10 years so OWC and Crucial are certainly good vendors but you know Samsung, Sandus, Kingston, Western Digital and I think anybody who's been making drives for more than a few years I would say is a good choice for an SSD. Yeah I would agree with that. Look for refurbs, Crucial for example they have a page where you can get notifications when they have refurbished drives so if you want to save some coin here but then what I found Dave is OWC actually makes a kit that combines my suggestions here and that they offer their SSD with an enclosure and that's the other SSDs are three and a half inch or two and a half inch and most full size drives are larger well you're going to need a bracket well they actually have and we'll link to it and I found the link to the product they actually have a product that includes their SSD and an enclosure so you can just slide it right into your X-Serve. Huh! Oh that's pretty good Yeah very cool. Yeah let me dug it up here yeah OWC SSD flash storage X-Serve G5 Zeon which I believe is the machine that he has there and that's it and now he said that he found some prices for SSDs that were crazy and in this case I'm looking here so they have a couple of kits the one with the enclosure they have it starts at 60 gigs for 52 dollars all the way up to 2 terabytes for 639 which I think are pretty decent prices seems pretty reasonable yeah for SSDs so I go for that so I think you can breathe new life into the machine yeah by getting an SSD now the trim thing I mean the only thing I'm thinking is yeah I mean for optimum efficiency you do want trim the older OS as far as I know Dave especially what did he say 10.6 does not have the trim command from the terminal and I'm not sure if well he could run trim enabler I think he'll take care of it yeah there's a few third party utilities that'll do the magic to enable trim so I'd agree trim is necessary to get optimum write performance sort of but I think it mostly affects the write performance and that if you don't have trim enabled then your write performance will do great over time whereas if you have it enabled then everything's cool yep yeah you know and it's interesting I did a series of surveys on Twitter John from the Mac Observer Twitter account asking people how old their daily driver Macs were and for the laptop crowd it was 60% of the folks that answered 62% I believe with laptops oh no no laptops are slightly lower it was like 59% of laptop owners that people that used a laptop as a daily driver were using a machine 4 years old or older and I think 20% were using a machine that was 7 years older or older on the desktops it was a little higher I think it was 64% at 4 plus years and almost 30 like 25 at 7 plus years and you know the reality is the reason I did this and then I asked take your daily driver out of the equation what's the oldest Mac that you use at least once a month and I think the number was 80% were using a Mac that was over 7 years old once a month so and this these surveys sort of came out of curiosity based on me realizing holy crap I've got 2 Macs in my house that are each 10 years old at least and they're fully functional like fully functional and part of what makes them functional is that they have SSDs in them right several years ago I migrated them all to SSD and now they're great they can't run Sierra or high Sierra so that will be their eventual downfall but you know they run really well they do everything that's needed and it's because you know we moved from having single core processors to dual core processors and you know our needs simultaneous with that our needs just you know haven't changed a whole lot in the last 10 years but what's interesting is 10 years ago when these machines were purchased you were buying a new computer every 3 years you know almost no matter what so it's really interesting to have this computer just lasting and lasting and I mean it's great so that's you know that's where we resurface some of these things where it seems to us like everybody might already have SSDs and all that stuff but not necessarily you know and you can really breathe new life into those older Macs by doing this and I'm my life at home is a testament to that in fact my laptop is still a 2011 MacBook Air and it works great for me and that's things 7 years old now which is just crazy so there you go yeah I'm still tickled though when you come over and you start giving it a work out and I can hear those fans spinning up there oh sure yeah of course well what is it a 1.4 gig processor yeah yeah yeah works great you know it's awesome but then I imagine you get I probably don't get a full day out of my machine but I'm sure you can get a full day out of it no no because I got the 11 well because I'm running the 11 inch Air which had the really small battery so I only get a few hours but if I had gotten the 13 yeah I bet I'd be getting you know quite a bit out of it yeah it's good stuff so yeah I put that leak in there so yeah OWC comes to the rescue they have a kit that will totally do the trick out your ex serve that's great alright well I want to make sure we say thank you to all of you once again for listening for contributing for checking out our sponsors you know all of that good stuff I want to thank cash fly cachefly.com which provides all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you um we didn't tell him how to contact us so you get one option this week we like to not overload you folks and we're already running past our normal time feedback at mackeykev.com is the place to email us right John? what he said, feedback at mackeykev.com feedback at mackeykev.com unless you're a premium subscriber in which case premium at mackeykev.com is one of your perks and we prioritize those I want to thank all the sponsors in our podcast marketplace we have um well let's see let me pull up the list we have otherworld computing we have bare bones which is great with bbedit we have roboform at roboform.com of course we have the sponsors we mentioned in this episode we have smile at smilesoftware.com podcast we have simplecontacts.com mgg and don't forget to check out the great deals on ring at ring.com mgg great stuff great sponsors gotta check it out we'll see you next week or I'll see you tomorrow in Princeton if you're gonna be there listen uh if you're gonna come to Princeton have fun because that's what they do so good meeting and then they go out for pizza afterwards at Contys which is great that's the reason people go so Dave's there so what Dave spoke now let's go to Contys and we'll have some fun but the important thing to remember is if you're gonna do that that you don't get caught may not