 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekgab Episode 676 for Sunday, September 24th, 2017. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekgab, the show where the goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least four new things. And we do that by answering your questions, sharing your tips, sharing cool stuff found and generally just kind of discussing these things that facilitate learning new things. And that's how it works. Sponsors for this episode include stamps.com, a new sponsor for us here where I've got a way for you to go get a four-week free trial, including some postage and a digital scale. So we'll talk more about that a little bit later here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Brown. How are you doing, Mr. John F. Brown? We're doing good, man. How are you? Anything happening today? Nothing that I know of. I don't know. What are you driving at, my friend? Oh, you know, any life status event that... Ah, yes. I am a day older than I was yesterday. But you're also a year older. Everybody wish Dave Hamilton a big, happy birthday. Thanks, man. Congratulations on making it this far. That's the idea, yes. That's the idea. Thank you. I appreciate it. I could think of no better way to start my birthday than to spend it with everybody here. This is a fun thing that we get to do. This is your first present of the day? Actually, my family woke up with me this morning and gave me some gifts. This is my gift to myself is really what that is. Yes. Yes, yes. All right. So let's do this thing. Let's start with some tips because I learned something prepping these tips as I always do. And we'll start with one that appeared on Facebook in our group there from Scott who says, did you know that search under iOS can do conversions? I was trying to figure out the cost for shipping a 50 kilogram item when prices are quoted in pounds. I entered 50 kilograms in pounds in the search field and it showed me the result. Of course, you can also ask Siri this if you want to do it verbally. So pretty cool. You know, we know these things sometimes we can intuit that it probably would do these things. And of course, that's true on macOS as well. You can do conversions there. And we talked about that actually recently on macOS, but it's right there in iOS as well. And I love stuff like that. Makes it fun. Yeah. Tandy. I wish we'd get with the program with the rest of the world and use the metric system, but I don't think that's ever going to happen. Oh, no, no, no. Conversion. We're entrenched. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. We need conversions anyway. It's always, you know, it's always good. Also on Facebook, listener Jim brings us. He says I upgraded to iOS 11 on both my iPhone seven plus and my iPad pro nine seven and everything seems to be okay, except for one thing. The files application doesn't appear on my iPad screen. It's still launchable by search and it appears in the new dock when launched, but it's nowhere to be found on the home screens. I think I'll try another reboot and he said the reboot didn't help. But what did is taking it from the dock in iOS and just dragging it back to the home screen, which will relocate something on the home screen. So it either was there in somewhere he couldn't find or we've seen this where apps just sometimes aren't there. But with the with the new dock on the iPad, he was able to find it and move it. So there you go. I love stuff like that. I mean, you know, it's quirky and all that, but I find I sometimes lose apps and that I'll fumble finger, you know, yeah, in the moving mode. And then I'm like, where did I put it? Sometimes everything jumps around and like a really, yeah, I'm wearing fashion and I put something where I didn't intend to. So I'm sorry. Did you have a question? No, I was going to say, have you tried the files app? You know, I just noticed it. So now that it's been mentioned here, I don't think I've noticed it on my iPad, but I noticed on my iPhone and I'm like, oh, that's yeah, they talked about that. So I'm like, OK, let me let me launch it. And it's like, hey, here's all these third party services that do cloud stuff that you can talk to. And I'm like, oh, well, that's nice. Let's yeah, let's create some connections here. So I think it's pretty cool. Oh, yeah, it's great. And there's even an on my iPhone section for those of you that haven't dug in, right? You can if you launch the files app in the upper right corner is the edit button, which is probably the first thing you're going to want to do as as somebody who's, you know, anybody listening to this show, you know, where we like to tweak things and get them set just right. So by hitting that edit button, you can go through and choose which of your cloud services are going to appear in, you know, the the files app. And like all of my even kind of what I would consider the weird third party stuff. I mean, of course, the the Synology stuff shows up there. Transmit shows up Dropbox, of course, iCloud Drive, obviously. And then even things like Hubek, which is a backup service that I've been using. I think you get, I don't know, you get like 10 gigs free or 15 gigs free or something, maybe 20, no, you get 25 gigs free with the Synology. Where's where's on my iPhone? So I go and like I launch the files app in the browse section. I go to the upper right. I hit edit and on my on my iPhone is one of my options. Under locations, correct. I don't see that. So I have, well, let's I mean, my speculation would be that. I have some I have something in the on my iPhone location. It's actually some files from an app called Capo, which is a cool little app that likes you like it analyzes song. It's for learning songs, but it it it analyzes them and then will put what it figures are like beat markers and also chords. It like it figures out what what the chords are. And then and and that's like super handy because if you want to play along with it or learn it like there's the chords. I mean, it's it's intuiting them from that are not intuiting. It's it's sorting them out. So they might not be exactly right, but they're pretty close. And but the the coolest part for me is you can then take a song and slow it down without detuning it. And it's a great way to start to learn like grooves and riffs and stuff like that, because you can play along with it and loop it and all that stuff. So yeah, Capo, if you're a musician of any kind, I use it to learn drum parts right, you know, in addition to anything else. But Capo has stored some things locally on my phone. So that may be why that location shows up. Otherwise, Apple says if you don't if you don't have maybe, you know, if you don't have anything there, we don't want you like trying to store stuff here. Like that's not their decision to make. Correct. I'm going to figure out how to help. But yeah, I see I see iCloud Drive, Google Drive, DS Cloud, DS File, OneDrive, Sandus Connect. That's cool. The little memory stick they make and Dropbox. So that's what I got now. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's fun stuff. So and, you know, while we're while we're at it, I want to kind of jump to a question that we had, because it's very much related to what we're talking about here or how Jim got to the Files app. And that's Jed, who says on iOS 10 and before I never launched apps by going to the app icons, I just used search. And so and I'm the same way. He just pulls down to, you know, to pull up the spotlight search, starts typing the name of an app when it appears you hit launch. He said, but now apps don't seem to come up as reliably says in order to get an app to launch, I have to type its entire name. So to say to launch Dropbox instead of typing DROP and seeing all the apps that might have that in their final name, he needs to type all of it, like even DROPB. Oh, doesn't show the app when he hits X, the app appears. And and the reason for that is settings that were inherited from what you had in iOS 10. In iOS 10, all apps were always searchable by their name 100 percent of the time, unless there was a problem. But there was no way you could tell it. Don't find this app. But you could go in to the Siri and search preferences in iOS 10 and turn off the app there, which would stop it from having its contents appear and be indexed. Well, I think they'd still be indexed, but the contents wouldn't appear in the results list. Now, in iOS 11, those two settings are combined. So if you have turned off Siri and search for an app, it won't launch unless you type or it won't show up to be launched unless you type the full app name. It's a pain in the neck. And the worst part is the user interface for turning this on in bulk is not fun. But if you go into settings on your iPhone, going to Siri and search, it will bring up a list of all of your apps. And you can see which ones do and don't have this turned on because underneath the app's name, it will say Siri and search suggestions if it's turned on. And if it's not, it'll just say off. And you have to go to each one and turn it on and then back out and then go to the next one and turn it on and back out. And so I'm slowly going through all my apps to to reenable this. It's a pain in the neck. But the good news is I haven't found it slowing down my phone. The reason I had turned all that stuff off was I found it slowing down my search results in iOS 10 and having it mostly now all on. It's not so bad. So there you go. That's what we do. That's how we do it. Don't you think, John? Usually. OK, let's see, along the concept of searching, I believe a different Scott on Facebook says, perhaps this is existed in prior versions of iOS 2. He says, but I noticed that certainly in iOS 10 and 11, I can search for keywords that were tagged in the Mac version of photos. So that's pretty cool. I didn't realize you could do that. He says, I wish I could actually add and edit keywords from the iPhone, but alas, no. And and iOS 11 doesn't have that. That functionality either. But but being able to search for the keywords that you have set elsewhere, i.e. on your Mac. Yeah, there you go. So pretty good. Right, John? Indeed. All right. You want to I can you want to take us to Joe? I can take us to Joe. OK. So Joe, Twitter, Twitter and Facebook this. But it's an interesting point to make and that you can still use iTunes to do management of things. Well, let me let me catch people up so that they're so that they understand what you're saying. In the last show in 675, we said that IMAZING was the only way for loading iOS apps back onto your iPhone and iPad from your Mac. Now that iTunes 12.7 has changed that that UI. And Joe says he owns IMAZING and it's great. But as John started saying, you can still transfer iOS apps to your iOS devices with just iTunes. You don't need to buy IMAZING. So I'll let you walk people through how that's done. And, you know, I don't exactly see it in this article for apps. I see it for other content. And the the the article that Apple published shortly after they changed things because they knew there'd be a uproar was one of these these articles is manually managed content on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch using iTunes. Right. So the way through the article, I don't see how it I don't see anything specifically for apps, though I see it for several other types of content. Right. So what you do is you connect your phone and you go to in your in the devices tab, right? On the or sorry, in the in the devices section. So you have to have the sidebar up in iTunes. It's a little wonky, but they explain this. In the in the the the the section on the on the bottom of of of the article that you talked about, you can drag things in once you have the iTunes sidebar up, which is going to be up when you're in the music section of iTunes and have the library tab or section selected. You can drag things from the finder into that sidebar right onto your device and it will put them on there. So that's how that's done. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. All righty. Yeah, man. Yeah, yeah. You want to take us to to John from Twitter? Yeah, John brought up a good one here. So in iTunes, there's no longer an apps. When you click on your device, there's a lot of categories of things that you can see on your device. But one of them that is no longer available as we all know, or if you don't try it. Apps isn't there anymore. Right. Wouldn't it be great if Apple made another app that would let you see the apps on your device? And they do, Dave. One of the things that yes, well, at least they haven't taken away the ability yet. Let's let's hope they don't listen to this. But Apple Configurator two. Oh, which lets you do all sorts of setting up profiles and configurations and managing of enterprise users use it. But regular back users like we or is that us like us? Like us. Yeah. Can also run Apple Configurator two. And you will notice that if you run it and you plug in your device, you will see an apps category in the sidebar and you click on it and it shows all the apps that are on the device. So you have not lost this ability with a Mac OS app. Huh, that's pretty interesting. Yeah, so it begs many questions like why did they leave it there but take it out of iTunes? And I think well, no, I mean, I like here's the thing that actually makes sense to me. I mean, Apple Configurator two isn't an obvious place to go and look right yet. But but taking it out of iTunes and cleaning iTunes up and pairing it down like they need to get all of the syncing and management of your devices out of iTunes. And they're doing that with much hand wringing from the public. But it should be in there should be some app that lets you do this. And so maybe Apple Configurator is the key there. That maybe this is the thing that lets you get there. And I don't know. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. I went and this was actually really handy. I, you know, I collect, man. I heard there too much singing last night some water. I you have you would be shocked at the quantity of water that I've been drinking this morning. But singing and sweating for a wedding I played last night. Anyway, I wanted to delete like a hundred apps off my iPhone. And I started, you know, the painstaking one by one process. And I thought now there's a bit there's got to be a better way. Let me see if I amazing will do it. So I connected my phone. Actually, I didn't even have to connect my phone because I had already done it. And so it was wirelessly connected. And I just went to my phone and I brought up my list of apps and I highlighted one and I deleted it. I was like, yeah, and I looked on my phone and it's gone. Like, oh, sweet. Great. And then I command clicked through a ton of apps and like, you know, selected like a hundred and I hit delete. Boom, gone right away. Good to go. So I was pretty happy about that. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Another little tip on I amazing, since it seems like that's become everybody's favorite app for for this stuff. Certainly ours. Brett reminds us, he says, I'm sure you already know this, but if you're running I amazing mini from the menu bar, select the I amazing icon to bring up the drop down and then click on the battery icon for any of your devices. It will give you detailed battery health status for that device. I think you've mentioned this in passing a couple of times, John, but I wanted to I wanted to highlight it because it's I didn't. Oh, I mentioned a bigger deal in that there's also a little you'll see near your device a little circle with an eye in it, which means info to everybody. That lists every piece of information about your iOS device that it can possibly glean through. That means that Apple makes available, including that battery info, but it's buried in there. So this is certainly handy if that's all you need to know. Right. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Cool. You want to you want to wrap up the tip section with the one from Dr. Bob on Twitter to Dr. Bob. So I saw a friend Dr. Bob on the Twitters and he asked for some support from Apple because Apple has a support account on. Yeah. If you don't follow that account or if you I mean you don't have to follow it to use it. But yeah, at Apple support is a good as a good one. Yeah. Yeah. And his question to them was, well, dude, how do I manage my tones and stuff now? Yeah. Yeah. And their answer was read this article. RTFM Bob. And it's called use tones on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. And it tells you how you can change your ringtone, read download previously purchased or moving tunes from iTunes to your device. So there you go. And it was written right around the time that they released the new iTunes. Of course. Because they knew people were going to ask this question. Yeah. Yeah. So this is, I mean, this is interesting. Everybody. It's funny. You know, I'll keep this brief because we've actually got tech tips and stuff to go through. But for so long, many of us, myself included have been ranting and shaking our fists as we do about iTunes has too much stuff. And it's too much functionality. You've got to clean it up. You've got to clean it up. Finally, Apple does something significant to clean what they considered cruft out of iTunes. And instantly, everybody's fists are shaking in the air. Why did you take that away from me? You're terrible. It's like, I can't win for losing. But there are ways of managing this stuff. They're just cleaning it up. So hopefully, hopefully, I think they are well aware of all of the things that, that we find frustrating about iTunes. And I think separating out iOS device management from it, once they can successfully do that and not, you know, hurt their, their business, I think that's going to be a really good thing. So I think they're moving. And I think the way to sum this up, Dave, and I've heard this phrase used in multiple contexts, but they did just what I asked for, but not what I want. Correct. Yes. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. We programmers are all too used to exactly that happening. Like, oh, that's what I told it to do. That's what I wrote, but it's not what I wanted. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, man. Hey, I want to, I want to take a minute here and talk about our new sponsor, stamps.com. You know, these days you can get practically everything that you want on demand, right? I mean, you can listen to this podcast whenever you want, when it's convenient for you. Sometimes you want to do stuff when it's not convenient to go to the post office, right? You want to, you know, get some postage. You want to get everything ready for a package or whatever. Well, stamps.com is the answer because you can do anything that you can do at the post office. You can do right from your desk with stamps.com. Right. You can buy and print official U.S. Postage for any letter package using your own computer and printer. Yesterday, Friday, I had, you know, we, at Backbeat Media, we have our publishers that we pay and most of them we pay with direct deposit, but we still pay a few with checks. And so we printed the checks and I went to grab, you know, window envelopes like we normally do. And I realized, oh, that's right. We're out of stamps. My crap. I don't have time. I bet I don't want to hold off on paying these people. Like that's, that's one of the things in business, man. Like I think if somebody deserves to be paid, you need to pay him right away. Like I don't want to lag on this. I really don't have time. And then I remembered, duh, you got a stamps.com thing. Good to go. They're your sponsor on Sunday. Great. So I went online and logged into our account and we had some postage there. And the nice part is, you know, like, like, like I said, you can buy anything you want. So I said I'm printing a letter and it said put it on the scale. I'm like, well, I know it's just a letter. I know it just needs a single stamp, but let's use the scale. So I put the stuff on the scale and it automatically connects USB to the computer and it weighed it and auto filled on the website. It was actually really cool how that all worked. And then it said, okay, you know, and I hit print and I printed just a regular envelope and it puts the postage on. I folded up the check and put it in there and I put it out at the mailbox and away it went just like it's supposed to. So really, really cool, really convenient 24 seven. Like this was the first time I used it and it took no time at all. Really, really worked well. And so you can do this too. You get a four week free trial or four week trial. And that includes postage and a digital scale. So a four week trial stamps.com includes postage and a digital scale. And the way you get that is you go to stamps.com. And then before you do anything else and this is the important part because otherwise you're not going to get the special deal. Click on the little radio microphone that's at the top of the home page and then click MGG. So go to stamps.com. I can speak. I swear I can speak. Go to stamps.com. Go up, click the radio microphone at the top of the home page and type in MGG. You can do it all right there. So awesome. Makes it so easy. We will always be using stamps.com here at Backbeat Media and Mac Observer and Mackie Kev going forward. It's awesome. Our thanks to stamps.com for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. That's pretty cool stuff though, I got to say. I love it when like, you know, the sponsor stuff becomes the cool stuff found. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. All right. iCloud. I swear both these questions that we're about to do are the same in terms of what I hope we're teaching here. So listener Mike writes, he says, my searches, oh, my contacts on my MacBook. He says originally running Snow Leopard upgraded a year ago to Sierra and on my iPhone running at this point in time, it was iOS 10 when he sent this in the latest, aren't synced. He says, I think they used to sync themselves. I suspect that broke with my Sierra upgrade a year ago and I haven't been able to get it back in sync. So we assume that that means he's rebooted the computer and the iPhone since this happened, because that's always a good way to kind of re-kickstart iCloud syncing. And you're right, Mike, they should be in sync. Sometimes on your Mac, you can use the console to get some further details on this. But often, the easiest path to resolution is to log out of iCloud on the troublesome device and log back in. That will very often jumpstart things because I think it cleans out some caches and it kind of forces it to rethink that process. But here's the thing, right? I know what I just said, log out of iCloud on the troublesome device. And you might be saying, but Dave, I don't know which one is being troublesome. I make changes on either one and they don't sync, but I don't know which one is the problem. And I know it's true, but you can find out. And the way you find out is log in to iCloud.com. We have visibility from iCloud.com into what Apple sees on their servers for our accounts, right? So go to iCloud.com, go to your contacts in this case, and take a look, right? Make a change on each device or something that you know is inconsistent between the two and see which one iCloud.com agrees with. Whichever one that is, that's likely the one that's not being troublesome. So log the other one out, then log it back in, and that should do it. But being able to see that stuff on iCloud.com versus what we couldn't do with dot-max sync where it was just a black hole most of the time and all that stuff, at least originally it was. It's really handy. And don't forget to use iCloud.com in your troubleshooting. It will get you answers that are often helpful. As Brian and Rowan are chatting in the room at macikeb.com.stream says, the truth is in the cloud. That is, I like that, man. It's so true. You know, no reference intended. But yeah, the truth is in the cloud. I like it. I like it. Yeah. What do you think about this, John? What I think is... So I was lamenting the state of iCloud sinkiness that people may be experiencing. Yes. Sometimes it's hard to tell, like in this case, in that we were sent two screenshots and one had certain things on it and one was missing one of them. And it's like, all right, well, that's a start to how to debug it. Of course, you gave the ultimate way to debug it because what's in the cloud is should be the authority. Well, it tells you which one is syncing with the cloud. And the cool part is you can make changes in the cloud, too, and see if those changes sync down to your device. So you can really kind of test this in all ways. It makes life easier. Yeah. Not, unfortunately, you can't see everything that's in the cloud. But a lot of things you can. Yeah. The thing I just noticed, though, is so I, you know, tried to run contacts on my iOS 11 upgraded iPhone 7 and I just got a notification saying contacts are no longer updated by Facebook. That's a surprise. Oh, that's right. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. We probably talked about this when it first came out. Yeah, Facebook, like that whole link between Facebook and Twitter and iOS that was happening at the system level is gone. And I think even, like the Twitter app, maybe it's seen an update since, but it was complaining to, oh, it wasn't the Twitter app. I went to use, like I was in Safari or something and hit the share sheet to tweet, you know, to share something on Twitter. And it originally came up. It's been fixed now with the update, but it was like, yeah, we'd have no Twitter accounts defined in iOS. So I got nothing for you. So, but they fixed that now. Just make sure to update all your apps, like super important now more than ever, just because of, you know, iOS 11. So stay on top of those updates, especially for, you should just stay on top of updates in general. I know sometimes an update will break something, but more often than not, like way more often than not, updating the apps is a good thing. And especially so right now that there's been this OS update. So that's my guess. Yeah, I only had like a casualties that the developer chose not to make a 64-bit upgrade. But none of them were critical. That's good. Yeah, I had, there was one critical app that I was worried about because it was an app that allows me to control one of the mixers that I use and one of the bands that I'm in. And it was only 32-bit. It was like, oh crap, I hope this company like stays up to date with this. And it, because the app hadn't been updated in like a year and a half. It's like, oh no. And then right before iOS 11 was officially released, they pushed an update out. And they're like, yeah, it just adds 64-bit support. It's like, oh, phew. So, but I always leave my, my mission critical. Like I have an iPad that I just use on stage and that iPad will probably stay on 1033 for a little bit longer, I think. Yeah. But I guess they had to do it in the interest of performance and battery life. Oh, totally. Yeah. No, it's, it's the right thing. Yeah, it makes life easier. It's been deprecated for a while. People had time to catch up. So. All right. The, the next question I promised that they were related and I think you'll see that they are, at least you'll see how I, how I'm looking at it. Evelyn on Facebook asks, I'm wondering if anyone else has this issue. Every time I have taken pictures on my iPhone, it takes forever for them to upload to my Mac. Is it just because I have over 19,000 pictures? So, what we're talking about here is what's going on in the cloud photo library. And, and again, it's, it's important to kind of step back and think about the process. They are not uploading directly to your Mac. They are going from your phone to the cloud and then from the cloud back down to your Mac. Sometimes, and I've actually seen this, I think I was telling you in pre-show today, John, I've had this week alone for people call me with this issue. So, what I've been seeing is that the photos upload to the cloud just fine. And again, how do we test that? Well, we go to iCloud and we look at our photos. If you're using iCloud photo library, you will see them there. If you're just using photo stream, you won't see them there. There's no visibility into photo stream from iCloud.com as far as I know. So, if it's just photo stream, sorry, you're going to have to test from another device to see if those photos are making it to photo stream and not your Mac, and that way you can narrow down where the device is. But I've seen it on my Mac and several others this week where photos just don't sink down from the cloud to the Mac. Rebooting the Mac often solves this problem. But, if you want to solve it yourself, generally what it is, is the syncing processes that sit in the background get hung. And the way to fix it is quit photos to get that out of the way. And then I go quit three other things in activity monitor and I have to do force quit, usually at least on one of them. And that is photos, space agent, photo library D, and photo analysis D. And we'll put a link to the Facebook post where this all exists. But those three, I go into activity monitor and what's cool in activity monitor is you can filter what you see. So, I just put in the word photo and then that way it narrows down the results and I can just see the processes of the photo in them somewhere. And then I just go, I kill those often and then re-launch photos and boom, instantly everything just starts pouring in. So hopefully that helps. But, John, you have some thoughts for if it's not the Mac, if it's the iPhone that's causing the problems. Right? I do. Well, you were telling me about them in pre-show so I thought maybe you'd share those again here. Um, oh, you mean the whole deal about, um, okay, them getting from the device up into the cloud. Correct. From getting from the phone to the cloud, yes, exactly. I have noticed that they may even still have this article but, so I'll dig around for it. But they said that there are certain conditions that under which the photos will not make it into the cloud and I think what they said is, number one, don't be running the camera app maybe they fixed that in iOS 11. Oh, interesting. So they don't sync until you leave the camera app? That's what I found at one point. That would kind of make sense because at least there you can start deleting, you know, you can take a picture and say, oh no, I don't want that. Delete it and it's not wasting its time. But I think if it's in the foreground, then it'll be like, oh, okay, well. Yeah, sure. And of course you got to be on, you got to have a decent Wi-Fi connection. I don't think that stuff's typically going to go over your data plan if you want it to. Well, no, you might want it to. Maybe you do. There's a couple places to set it, but if you go on iOS 11 into settings photos, you can turn a lot of these things on and off and cellular data is one of those options and you can turn on or off using cellular data for updating your library. By default, it's on. And then there's another option in there and I actually don't know what this is for. It says unlimited updates. And I'm not sure what that means, but the help text underneath it says unlimited updates may cause you to exceed your quota. Now, I don't know what that means, but there you go. So if you've got an unlimited plan, maybe that's what this is for. That one was off by default for me, by the way, but cellular data is on. So and I definitely I actually disagree with you on that. I definitely want my phone to sync photos new photos up to iCloud with cellular data. I mean, that's like the whole point of it. I want those things backed up immediately. I don't want to wait until I'm on, you know, some Wi-Fi network later or whatever. I took the picture. I want it backed up. That's what to me. That's what iCloud photo library is for. There you go. I mean, you can turn it off if you don't like it. Yeah, in my case, that's what the data is for. I'm just wary because I had my data plan mysteriously balloon almost to its limit and I had no idea what app was responsible for it. And also, I only have two gigs data month where I'm sure you have much more than that. I do. I don't know if you have unlimited or I just deprecated those. Yeah. Well, then they have an unlimited plan again that we've thought about going to where with AT&T and we have the 15 gig plan it's shared among six of us, the four of us in my house and then my dad and his wife. We're all family members which makes it great for Apple Music and also for this data. But that 15 gigs is right for us. You know, generally in a month, we as a family use about 12 and there's at least one person in my house that could care less about limits. My daughter is a data holic. She'll stand up in front of the room and say, hi, my name's Skyler. I'm a data holic and she just can't help herself. She knows, she's like, oh yeah, it's a problem. I'd love to watch like food videos and things like that and I'll do it over cellular because I can't not. And so she uses about six gigs a month somewhere between four and six. I'm usually about two. Sometimes I go over if I'm traveling but the 15 gig plan works. Unlimited would be nice just because we wouldn't have to think about it but it would probably cost us an extra 50 bucks a month to move to that just because we're on an older plan that we've got some discounts baked into it that wouldn't follow forward. So every time I look it's like, you know, if you could do this for like the same price or five or 10 bucks more, I'd jump to it but yeah, 50 bucks, we just we never go over because we got roll over data. So we can when we do go over we're, you know, borrowing from what we didn't use last month. So there you go. That answers your question. Right. All right. Um, you want to take us to Ralph, my friend? Ralph had a question. He did. Let me get that question up here. There it is. Figuring out my screens here. All right. I have a solution for you but we'll get to that question. But I have a solution for you. Yeah. But anyways, David, John, quick question regarding your discussion with Oauth. If I utilize a Google or Facebook login for a website and that brings me to a page that says the website is only requesting my name and email address dot dot dot, then I authorize that website to use the Oauth token. What happens if they change the requirements and now want other information from my Facebook account like friends or my birthday. If I already authorized them previously, can they request new information that I originally authorized more information than I originally authorized just trying to make sure I don't get caught which is a honorable goal. Oh, that's that's honorable. Yeah. For sure. And here's the answer. So one thing I tossed in the show notes for the last show we had some was the programmers guides for the various services of Facebook. They're typically called login or sign in. So Facebook login Twitter sign in, Google sign in, whatever and they all have a number of aspects to them. One is providing authentication and the other is asking well what do you want to share? Is that okay? And just for clarity because we got some notes where we're talking about this thing that we call Oauth and not spelling it so we didn't explain the genesis of the term it's O-A-U-T-H or short for open authentication. So it's a system and this is what we described last week where you authenticate with one service and then that service vouches for you effectively elsewhere so that other people don't have to build login systems you can just use that one. So there you go. And the good news Dave is that if you dig into the document which I painstakingly tour through every page not really. So I went into the web section then they have a permission section and they explicitly say in that when you ask for new permissions the person using your app will be asked about those new permissions and has the ability to opt out. So I appreciate the sneaky thinking because yeah what if an evil developer wants to all of a sudden get access all sorts of additional things and maybe this was a security thing in the past I don't know but it's certainly not the case now. Right. So don't sweat it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. And then we had one other thing on Facebook where listener Michael was saying if my credential service if my credentials for the service that I'm using like Facebook in this case are leaked or lost will that allow an attacker to access even more accounts presumably they would see what all off tokens are there and then could go to those sites and log in and yeah, that's true for sure. So yeah if you're using Facebook or any of these as you're kind of as your single sign on to the web if you will then yeah you really need to protect that pretty diligently with a good password probably two factor authentication which most of them now support in fact I wouldn't do the whole point in my opinion of doing all off is that you're choosing to say hey I'm going to trust this service to keep my authentication credentials secure and therefore I don't have to worry about whether or not that service and that service and that service keep their systems up to date because I'm just going to use this one but if you're going to do that you have to sort of you have to meet them halfway and take advantage of all of the security that they have so don't use you know a four digit password that's easily guessable one one one one is bad you know one two three four is worse but but you know also use two factor authentication and really lock that down so that so that you're there the nice part about it is generally once you've logged in on your you know on one device it it likes you and so you don't have to go through all the pains of the two factor every day and all that stuff so it can be helpful but but meet them halfway yes right John I'll meet them you did you meet them yeah hey uh so I um I uh I want to jump around a little bit because listener Joe has a question that uh that I think might help you John and uh and that is he said I have a widescreen and vertical dual monitor set up at work says I'm a doctor in this use case so I need various sources of info open at the same time uh he says I need to see all kinds of things at basically at once to uh to deal with our you know healthcare IT and all the systems I need to log into so he has to have his agencies his uh practice agencies thing open he needs to have the state's web portal open he has to access a patient document on a you know secure server locally he needs to access another state portal and then he needs to keep email and Skype open so that he can monitor for you know incoming things and all that and then he says uh it's a double whammy effect if I have to mess around with my main default setup to do this task and then reconstruct those previous windows afterwards he says it becomes a cacophony of opening and closing windows and of course I would love these window locations to survive a reboot as well and then he goes on to say if he happens to disconnect the monitor and plug it back in then everything just blows up he said so I'm wondering he tried switch res x but that wasn't quite doing it and he says is there another utility you know of that'll help me keep all of my window locations exactly where I want them and restore them when I want them preferably across reboots automatically but also on demand and the answer is yes and anyone who is using multiple monitors likely even on a single monitor to be perfectly honest I mean his use case perfectly describes this for a single monitor as well but certainly with multiple monitors where a simple disconnect of a monitor just causes everything that you had over there set up pristinely to just barf all over your main screen and then putting them back is like he said this you know tedious thing and that's a pain in the neck so yeah there is a piece of software and it's called Stay from CordlessDog.com and it does exactly I mean you couldn't have described a use case better and so Stay is it man and I use it I would probably have lost all of my sanity by now if you know I'm an old man now John I just keep getting older this happens every single year as you mentioned at the beginning of the show you're still under the threshold okay all right there you go I always hope to remain under the threshold at least in spirit well I think as long as we do this right that's right but having this especially when I said I was going through all those problems like figuring out like my monitor just wouldn't turn on and the only way to do it was to disconnect or reconnect power or power cycle thing and I mean Stay just like puts everything back where I want it I don't have to think about it I put it all there I say this is how I want my screen set up and it's like okay good to go and you can have different profiles and stuff it's awesome hopefully it always keeps working and you know I haven't I honestly haven't tested this with High Sierra yet but we're going to just let's see let's see hmm it's been December since it was updated so I have a feeling it'll work you know we can talk a little bit about High Sierra because there are some things fundamental things that change with High Sierra but in terms of use when you launch it you're not going to notice a whole lot different I don't think it's basically an under the hood update a major one and there are some apps that won't run as if you're running an older app we run FileMaker here and we've got one set of databases that's still on what I'll call the old format which changed many years ago with FileMaker 12 so we're on FileMaker 11 with this one database and that will change this week we've got to jump that up to FileMaker the 12 and later format to match all the other stuff that we do because FileMaker 11 just doesn't run on High Sierra at all I mean it does but it crashes a lot and it's fine I mean it's like five years old or whatever so that's okay six years old I guess but so there's going to be some of that stuff but in terms of of what you'll see when you run things I don't you know I would guess that something like Stay would probably work quite quite fine on it but there are under the hood things and if you are running on an SSD you've probably heard this but we'll state it here too when you upgrade to High Sierra you will be upgraded to the new file system you it will very likely all the testing that we've done here has seen that happen without issue or fanfare it works just fine you often don't even know that it's happening until afterwards and you go to do a get info on the drive and it says yeah you run an APFS which is pretty cool the fact that they can do that you know right on top we can we can thank all of us iOS users for being the beta testers for that over the top upgrade which is cool so I don't know there you go what are any thoughts on High Sierra to share with people as they're diving into their first week with it John no none I mean you've run it any like I mean did you notice anything was there other than the file system stuff you know was there anything that just like jumped out at you not really yeah same I looked at it and I'm like well looks the same seems to work the same I mean you'll notice you know there's some new features and photos and you know some of the apps have some incremental improvements but nothing that blew me away because I don't think that's the intent of this release this is to fix the plumbing yeah yeah so rather than remodel the the the bathroom right right it does whatever room no that's good up as your Mac yeah yeah yeah yeah so I have and I mentioned this before so I won't go too long on it but I have found that on my on my older 2011 air which is sort of my test machine that I always try new OS's on and will until either I you know trade it out or OS's don't run on anymore and those two things will probably go inside but that machine runs way faster with high Sierra then then it did with Sierra and it's it's as I said sort of the management of all the background processes that that sort of run these days happens much better with high Sierra and I've heard others reporting this as well but you mentioned photos and I do want to note that iOS 11 and high Sierra use a new photo compression codec and a new video compression codec and it's it's called high efficiency video compression high efficiency image compression and it's it's they create files that are dot h e i c or dot h e i f for images and then dot h e v c or dot h e v f so this replaces JPEG for the internal storage on your devices when you're when you go to share a photo from your iPhone it converts it to JPEG on the fly and and off it goes but this format this h e i f format is way smaller way more efficient I guess is the right way to say it hence the term high efficiency but it creates smaller files than JPEG for the same quality or greater quality at the same file size and and it is the standard for photos now so you may see these things come up and but you know it's fine but you don't really have to worry about it just be aware of it in case you happen to run an app that's looking directly at your photos library either on iOS or on on High Sierra and it's trying to like if it's an older app and it's just doesn't have support for h e i f then that's bad so there you go have you messed around with with anything I mean I know you've been using iOS 11 so sort of by default you've been using h e i f John but have you have you done there's nothing that's impacted my workflow got it burning yeah I f or as I like to think of it the sound of a cat coughing up a hairball there you go yeah yeah yeah or heek I don't know yeah I do like the new safari but we get that either and see you already have that if you updated this this week in Sierra to the new safari where you get it it's it's got all that new private browsing stuff that the ad industry is up in arms about and you know and I say this as a member of the ad industry screw the rest of the ad industry this is a really good thing tracking has actually ruined the ad industry I'm not I'll stop my rant there I think you I think my feelings on this are pretty clear I think what Apple's doing is perfect and I think the ad industry has to adapt and the last 12 years of disaster in the web ad industry perhaps is is coming to an end and we can we can do things the right way but there you go so there's that and then there's also they the video auto playing but you get to have off by default and you can you can actually enable it on a per site basis I I've actually found it breaks video playback in some embedded players interesting I mean it doesn't auto play but the thing that I found is one thing on YouTube but I tried to click to move the video forward into the little bar yeah progress bar and the click it didn't register it it's like huh huh that makes want to jump ahead yeah that makes sense yeah yeah so I don't know if I got to get it yeah I guess the people that make these things may have to tweak them cool yeah so I mean there are definitely some things that are new but it's not like you know it's going to look extremely familiar to you when you run this yeah I like the ad thing though because one thing that's always annoyed me is you know especially it's like stop following me yeah it's like every say you go to shows you the thing that you saw on Amazon that you didn't buy and it's like stop bugging me yes stop it that's right yeah yeah it's crazy all right um let's see where are we here I can't even see the time anymore because I've got safari in the way I have too many safari speakers yeah go ahead yeah perfect take a Sebastian please I want to take you to Sebastian because I had I ran into this and it's a big pain in the neck and I don't know why this is the case but okay I'm assuming this is the case in his case in which case Sebastian says I've downloaded and try to install a printer driver for a RICO SP-410 DN okay okay I'm currently unable to access main printer features such as two-sided changing the paper type and every option is generic how do I reinstall the RICO SP-410 DN to access all of the native printing features I also have a bunch of presets on another older computer how do I get these settings to my new computer so I do not have to try to remember all the presets I hope this is a fair question because if it's not I don't know where to go with this because I ran into this exact same problem okay no I recently had my decade old HP inkjet just die on me or it said the print head is bad and it's like I just changed it in cartridge why did that break the print head but it did it could be using that knockoff ink finally caught up with me so I got a Canon IX6820 okay light years ahead in every respect and one thing but one thing I ran into was setting it up and what happened is you know you go to the system preferences printers you add a printer and then you get a dialogue and it'll show you the candidates that are available and so one it should appear but I found that if you take the wrong path Dave terrible things like this can happen and the path that I did take was that I clicked on the name of the printer and the kind was banjordo I don't think that mattered and then you get a couple of choices what to name it it's location okay and then there's a use menu and at least in my case it defaulted to air print which is kind of cool but here's the problem the air print driver the other option is the printer itself right or Canon IX6800 series the first time I set it up I chose air print and then I ran into a similar issue is that one of the reasons I got this printer was that it prints the 13 by 19 paper so you know I went into photos took one of my masterpieces and wanted to print it out and then I go to select the paper size and I'm like it's 13 by 19 it's not there and it wasn't there it made me sad I'm like what am I doing wrong and I finally went to the Canon support board and someone suggested this and they're like oh yeah by the way explicitly select the Canon driver again when you're setting it up and then you'll get all the features so even though you had installed the Canon driver when you added the printer a second time it went and chose the built-in macOS driver not the one is that right when I installed it when I made the operating system aware of it through the printers right right dialogue I made the wrong choice is what happened got it okay yeah no that's good to know right it's great it defaulted to it which bothers me because it defaults to a choice that may not give the user the full capabilities of their product I don't know why it does this if it's Canon specific but it sounds like it's not I'm almost certain this is what happened to Sebastian is that it probably defaulted to well you I mean you you just this is an Apple product John the I mean macOS is no I don't say this to be snarky although I mean I realize I'm being snarky but Apple prioritizes clean reliable consistent user experience over all the features that you know all the tweaks and nuances that that you or I or anybody listening to the show might want right so when you add a printer their goal is to give you a printer that works right and a driver that works and that they know works and doesn't have a lot of cruft in it so but it means that it's going to be missing features almost by definition maybe that's why you can if you're willing to go out and download the driver and know that that's an option and you want to put it in there and choose it then by all means you get all the features and if something if the vendor does something a little wonky because you know that happens all the time then or you upgrade to high Sierra and suddenly Canon's driver doesn't work because they haven't updated for high Sierra and there's some feature you know that we don't know about that they don't know about that breaks it well but you're using a third-party driver if you use Apple's driver which really is usually originally at least written by the third party and then sort of certified by Apple then that will work with high Sierra right I mean like that's part of the Apple experience that we have to a buy into but also be find our ways around and it's why we do the show so I get it like it said it's not my favorite thing I always choose the third-party drivers for the printers that I have but well yeah because you want to get all the most bang for your buck you pay for all these features and I'm willing to deal with you know a quirky thing here or there if it happens so there you go yeah yeah I wasn't I actually try I got real close is that I actually created a custom paper size but it wouldn't print borderless it almost got me to the point of being able to print on a 13 by 19 okay but there was still a border and that just drives me mad well some printers like have to have a border for the rollers to roll I mean you can't print this one doesn't this one has the capability to do borderless just when I put it in a frame I don't want yeah yeah a border right that's just me and then and then the question this one's pretty straightforward yeah your presets where they at I'll tell you where they're at home library preferences and then you're going to see a file with naming kind of like this com.apple.print.custompresets.4 printer f or printer dot something and that's indeterminate because in my case I saw two things I saw the name of my inkjet printer Canon whatever but then I saw another entry on my computer and it was the IP address of my laser printer so it could be anything but should be able to figure it out so that's where that stuff is stored so you should be able to just copy that and paste it to the new environment and good to go yeah should be good to go yeah that they did change the naming convention versus you know I started doing some research and I like oh yeah it's here and here's the name of it what I found didn't have the for printer thing so right right cool alright let's change gears a little bit here we've still got a little bit of time Michael on Facebook brings up his question brings up a thing that you know like everything we're always looking for what's the what's the negative of information here and what's the shareable tidbit so Michael says one thought on the lack of iOS app store in iTunes for the Mac this is not going where you think it is trust me if you're sick and tired of hearing iTunes rants I'm with you I'll get there there's a tip he says today I was using an app and thought I would go to the app store to review it as I usually do I write my app store reviews in a text editor and then copy it and paste it into iTunes I started then remembered that I cannot do that so I gave up I hate hate hate he says writing reviews on my iPhone it's too small and I make too many typos so I simply will not write app reviews anymore he says if anyone is like me this lack of yep okay so we get you we hear you but here's a trick that you can do to start it exactly the way that you did prior go to your Mac go into whatever your tech favorite text editor is and write your review and then do the second step copy that review to your clipboard assuming you're using a Mac and an iOS device that are current enough to support clipboard sharing or whatever that handoff feature is officially called now go into your on your phone and go say I want to write a review and put your text field in the you know get yourself to where the text field is ready for you to type the review and instead of typing tap and pull up paste and when you hit paste the clipboard from your Mac will be pasted into that field and I always forget about this that you can do this shared clipboard thing and it's awesome it's great when I have to do like I mean sometimes I wind up doing it with passwords or you know different things where it's like yeah I just want to I need this data from here there and I don't want to have to retype it I can see it on my screen on my Mac so I copy it and then paste and and you'll see it like there's a little bit of a lag when it says oh you want me to get the clipboard from your Mac great and it just sort of does that so yep it is that to me that's the way to do it and and it's great I use the feature all the time but but it's easy to forget that it's there if you're not using it all the time so it's a good question Michael and I'm sorry you're unhappy about iTunes 12 7 I don't think it matters whether we're happy or unhappy like I said before this is just this is the new normal here we go yeah yeah yeah yeah um I'll jump around it's my birthday John so I'm going to do this question from Dan if you if you don't mind we talked about capo before so any musicians listening to this show here's another one but then this you know goes in a different direction and then you might think initially listen to Dan on Facebook asks I'm learning bass guitarists and seeing as I've got an iPhone 7 I have caused to use the supplied dongle to plug my phones audio out my headphones audio out into my practice amp the thing is the quality is awful and I realized that there must be a tiny little DAC in the dongle if I've understood that correctly is the only way to get better audio to buy a third party DAC of some sort yeah so you're right that the that the dongle has a DAC in it and by DAC we mean digital to analog converter you this used to exist inside the iPhone and still does because you have to convert sound to analog in order to put it out the speakers that are in the iPhone but out the lightning port you don't get analog you get digital and so Apple has they built a little a little DAC into that to convert the digital signal analog and the quality of your DAC will make a huge difference to how things are going to work and how things are going to sound I'm going to set Dan's specifics aside for a moment but we'll come back to it in a general sense Apple's DAC isn't bad there's a reason it's not working with your base amp and I have that's what we'll come back to but if you want much higher quality headphone output you can get a DAC that will work with it now there are many USB powered third party DACs that you can buy I use on my computer down in the office audio engine D1 and it sounds freaking amazing like I don't I didn't think it would make that much of a difference moving my speakers from the audio out jack on my iMac to the audio out jack on this you know tiny little little box that I connected to my Mac with USB it makes all the difference in the world like music sounds deeper, richer, wider it's a remarkable difference I really didn't expect it and I kind of raved about this before in the past so if you want to step up the game of the audio quality coming out of your Mac just from a pure listening standpoint you can do that now the audio engine D1 has a USB B port on it so it's like that you know sort of house shaped port square thing that you find on a lot of printers you have to get a lightning to USB B cable to see if the iPhone could power that DAC and then use it because it's just USB powered I don't know if it can or not right but that to test that that's what you need to do Ankyo makes a DAC that they call the HA200 that has a USB A port and it says it works with lightning so that one would be one to get and of course I'm sure it comes well I don't know if it comes with a lightning to USB A cable you'd have to look at the packaging details but you charge your iPhone with a lightning to USB A cable all the time so you have that cable so that would be another one and then I know AudioQuest has a lot of lightning things and they have their Beetle DAC which would require a lightning to USB cable might work again I don't have it to test but AudioQuest I know people have spoken I've never tested their DACs I actually like to but I've I don't know if there's this power over lightning but there you go Any thoughts on this before I wrap up by just answering Dan's quick thing about what will make his base work better John? Nope. Okay alright so the thing with your base is you're taking headphone output and running it into your amplifier so you're taking amplified output headphone output is not line level output it is built to like there is such a thing as a headphone amplifier and that is happening in that process and that can that can be the problem with why things sound like crap coming out of your amp turn the volume way down on your iPhone you might be able to make things work even with the current little dongle that you have but they make little things that will plug into your lightning port and I'm 99% certain I'm looking here that IK Multimedia's iRig I think they have the iRig lightning right I mean why am I not finding this on their website but maybe it's the iRig Pro maybe that's what I'm thinking of uh I'll put a link in the show but I'm pretty sure yeah yeah yeah the iRig Pro that's what you would want and then you can plug from that I think that'll go out or is that only in I thought it was going the other way but maybe not maybe that's why I'm thinking of the wrong thing your issue is gain you're sending too much gain out to your amp and so that you just need to get that to turn down so you need to go lightning to line level and not headphone output which is different that's the issue I'll find something I as we prep the show I'm like oh the iRig's the thing and then I remember as obviously as we're talking here that the iRig is really meant for input so I'm not sure that that's the right thing but we'll get you something Dan we'll figure it out I'll post on that facebook post and we'll follow up with that any thoughts on that John don't amplify an amplified signal well right yeah or an over modulated signal well it'll you will get over modulation if you if you keep amplifying something over and over again in different stages of the gain structure that's correct yeah yeah that's right yeah I like it alright man well I think that gets us there right I think it's time to bring the band there right right there here um no there well back there yeah here there everywhere I don't know man it's crazy it's crazy what happens in this world I want to make sure we thank our premium subscribers matgeekup.com premium is where you can go those of you that are we mentioned it last week but those of you that are on credit card billing will very likely be getting an email this week about shifting over to the new system we've been testing it with some of you if any of you want to volunteer to test before we ask you please just reach out to us premium at matgeekup.com is of course the email address that you get to use when you are a premium supporter and that's a good one to get in touch with this week we had contributions come in from Micah P Santiago M Steven A John V John D Todd Z Luande Giles C Craig R George M Graham M William P Daniel H and Royce T thank you thank you thank you you all rock it really means a lot to us and I'm going to apologize again for having to ask you to migrate manually to a new system but it's the only way we can do it without these people essentially trying to steal a bunch of money from us so I know they're not really stealing they're just doing their thing but it's an antiquated business model that they're hanging on to and they don't like it so we're moving past them moving into the future is what we're doing so there you go we mentioned how premium listeners can get in touch with us but everybody is welcome to use the feedback at matgeekab.com address did you say the feedback at matgeekab.com address oh I did I said the feedback at matgeekab.com address and also everybody is welcome to use our phone number where you can leave us a voicemail or send us a text message 224-888 geek which John is four three three five as far as you know that it is John that's right and I want to make sure we thank everybody we want to thank all of you for listening we want to thank Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth cachefly.com we want to thank our sponsors of course stamps.com you go there you click on the little radio thing you put in MGG and you get 110 bucks worth of all sorts of freebies and freebies which is just awesome included with your trial and you get great stuff from our friends at otherworldcomputing at maxsales.com you can get BB at it from our folks at barebones.com smile at smilesoftware.com I hope you all have a splendid week enjoy High Sierra let us know if you have any questions tips or problems about that of course and you know don't get caught