 35. OK, let's go. Five, four, three. The Mac observers, Mac, Geek app, Episode 818 for Monday, June 8th, 2020. And welcome to the Mac observers, Mac, Geek app, the show where you send questions, tips, cool stuff found in. We take them, we digest them, we answer the questions we then we share the answers to the questions and then discuss them and then share our tips and discuss those and share cool stuff found. And we have a lot of cool stuff found to start off with this week. So we'll share our thoughts about those two. The goal is that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for the show include BB at it with their new version 13.1 at barebones.com and linoad at linoad.com slash MGG, where you get 20 bucks just because you're a Mac, Geek app listener. We'll talk about the details of those a little bit later in the episode. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. There is John F. Brown. It's good to see you, man. For those of you that are on our live but not in person studio audience stream, welcome to right. Because we got people in the chat room at live.macgeekapp.com and then on YouTube and Facebook to watching us and listening as we as we record this for all of you. Let's I mentioned we have cool stuff found, John. I want to get right to it if that works for you. Oh, definitely. OK, cool. Peter brings one in. He says, I was thinking about the conversation I've heard on a couple of the Mac Observer podcast about how the built-in webcams on Macs are not great and also the problem I have here in my office of having my MacBook Pro off to the side of my main monitors. I end up appearing to look off to the side and also in backlit by my window when I'm on a zoom call. I remember that it's possible to use the iPhone camera to capture video and stills on the Mac. So I wondered if I could do the same for webcams and zoom. I found an iOS app called Epic Cam, E P O C Cam. He says you need Mac downloadable drivers from Canoni.com. We'll put all these links in the show notes, which does exactly this. He says there was a quick terminal command documented on the site to get zoom to be able to recognize the camera. But other than that, it works flawlessly. This was the free version. There's also a 799 option with more bells and whistles. He says that I very well may spring for it. So that's pretty cool. Not only can you have a better camera on your Mac, but you can. You could have two cameras on your Mac. I don't know if you could use more than one iPhone to even have, you know, three or more cameras on your Mac. But if you've got an old iPhone that, you know, maybe sits around and could use some repurposing. My guess is this might work with an iPod touch, too. I don't know what the minimum version of iOS is that's required for this. But I like this idea. This is great. Epic Cam. Cool. Thanks, Peter. Pretty good, man. I haven't tried it out yet. Have you, John? Not yet. But I think I have a touch. So I should I should try it with my eye touch. Try it with your touch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's called an eye touch. It's called an eye touch. Yes, thanks, John. It's I just know that that term infuriates some people. I don't know why. Yeah, well, because it's wrong. But, you know, yeah, yeah, this. Right. Exactly. All right. You want to take us to Ben next from Ben? Well, this is short and sweet, but. Ben writes for John, who claimed in 817 he couldn't find an online video grabber. Well, I couldn't, but I didn't look very hard. But Ben did because there's a safari or a video grabber with a safari extension. And the one that he recommended, Dave, is Downey. And I'm like, oh, wow, well, you know, let me go online and check it out. So I went online to check it out. And you know what, Dave, it's a part of set up. So I already had it. Oh, nice. Oh, I definitely need to check this out. That's great. Yeah. And, you know, the icon appears in safari. And, you know, you click on it when there's a page with a video and it downloads it and I didn't really have to do anything except tell it to put it somewhere else because it by default would put it in the downloads folder. But, you know, download an MP4 and was able to play it back. So so it's nice. And if you have set up, you know, doesn't cost anything, check it out. That's pretty good. And do you can you change the default download location? Oh, yeah. OK. Oh, OK. All right. Cool. Yeah. And there's a whole bunch of other options and coding and stuff like that. But I didn't really have to fiddle with it. It just worked out of the box. So I I want to give a shout out to another piece of cool stuff found. You've reminded me here, John, called Permute, P-E-R-M-U-T-E. It's also in set up. I've used it for years to convert F-L-A-C files, which are a type of lossless audiophile to either Apple lossless or or or just like AAC. If I don't need whatever I've got in lossless, it does a great job with it. Saves me having to remember all of the, you know, command line food to get that done properly. It just it just does it. It's great. Yesterday, I used it because we had a video that we were trying to play as part of our live stream for one of the bands I mean called Bitter Pill. And I went to play the video. I had slurped it down from YouTube, you know, doing my my darndest and had to save it as MP4, I think, because Memo Live wouldn't play the MKV that YouTube, the downloader that I used, brought down. And evidently, in my process of converting it to an MP4, I stripped all of the audio out of it. So for playing a music video, that was a little, you know, not so good. In real time, I thought, well, let me see what I got on the computer here that might be able to convert this MKV the right way. And permute did that, too. I had no idea that it did video converters as well. So so permute and that's also part of set app. So I'll put that in the show notes, but that's that's pretty good. Yeah, I got to add Downey now. Maybe maybe Downey would have been the right solution to begin with. And I may not have needed permute. So yeah. Coolio. All right. Clip grab is Bruce's suggestion. He says, after many years of using plugins in Firefox or Chrome to download videos that were then discontinued or just plain failed, I finally gave up and turned to clip grab instead. It's a free download and converter for YouTube, video, Facebook and many other online video sites. It converts downloaded videos to MP4, MP3 or other formats in just one easy step. It's easy to use and it's free to thumbs up. So not for Safari, but yes, for Firefox or Chrome. So there you go. You had another one that might have saved me some embarrassment headache and requiring my bandmates to vamp. Thankfully, those people all know how to vamp. It is that is a ban mostly of people who are also theater folks. So vamping is never an issue. In fact, sometimes it's a problem. So. But that's OK. That's OK. Got another one for us, John. Lonnie's got one for us. And Lonnie says, I just wanted to pass on a newer alternative to GFX card status mentioned in Maki Gap 816. And it's called G Switch. And there's a link here, which of course will be in the notes. And it appears to be a newer alternative requiring 10.12 or higher. I'm running it on a 2014 Macbook Pro 15 inch after having trouble getting GFX card status to work. So I'm like, all right, you know, with the newer is better. Usually. So I thought I'd check it out. And the only thing with it, Dave, is that, you know, I initially downloaded the installer and tried to run it. And I got something from Mac OS saying, I'm not happy with this because it's not. I can't check it for virus or something. And I'm like, huh, huh, that's really weird. What it was really saying. So apparently it's it's a developer build. And I guess Mac OS treats them differently. But eventually what? So, you know, I looked up this error online and here's the problem. I had to go to system preferences, security and privacy, general. And then there was a button there saying, yeah, I block this from installing. You want you want to install it anyways? And I'm like, yeah, sure. So was it a system extension? Is it one of those things or or was it just something else? No, I mean, it goes, you know, it goes up in the menu bar, but I don't know exactly why it why it was blocked. Well, I had to I had to search and then I found why. So you want to go to, you know, something wasn't signed properly or, you know, I guess it is a kernel extension or something. Sure. But it was system preferences, security and privacy, general, right? Yeah. And then you'll see a button saying, hey, you know, you want to install it. The nice thing about it. So I was running it and here's one thing that it does that the other product as far as I could tell it does not do. So I was running my Mac last night and I think I had photos open, but I wasn't on power. And then, you know, I was getting low on a charge. So I plugged my Mac in and all of a sudden I got a notification. It's like, hey, I'm engaging the GPU and I'm like, oh, well, that's interesting. But in its menu bar, it actually showed which app was turning on the GPU. And it was photos. So that was so if anything, if nothing else, it also helps you learn the conditions upon which your machine or it tells you what's turning on the GPU or yeah, that's handy. Huh. Didn't it also clued me in on a interesting piece of behavior is that photos won't engage the GPU, at least on my system. It won't engage the GPU if you're on battery. I guess to save power because I mean, when you think about it, do you really need the GPU to display photos? And I would say you probably don't. Well, I mean, it depends on what math Apple's doing, right? Because they're they're resizing the photos for the screen. And so, you know, it's probably faster to so in that sense, it's more efficient to use the GPU. But from a power standpoint, maybe, you know, obviously using more power. So even though it takes a little longer, maybe using the CPU for it is a better option for power conservation. Yeah. Yeah. And it lets you manually, you know, select which if you want to use the discreet or the internal graphics as well. Right. That's and I've done that at times, you know, the thing is, I'm like, you know, I wonder if engaging the GPU would make this better. And even for video and stuff, I my eyes couldn't tell the difference. Well, again, I think it's important to remember that the GPU is more about math than it is display. I mean, in this instance, right, isn't it's not it's not changing the way colors will appear or anything. Or maybe it is. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I thought it was in all of these instances. I thought the GPU was more about how the math is done. And of course, GPUs do math way more efficiently in that sense. So that's that's what I thought it was for was more about efficiency, which would make it possible for like frame rates to be higher and things like that. That's why I think that's why they're built that way to begin with so that you're doing you're offloading all of that stuff. And the you know, the shading and all that those things are sort of just happening there. So maybe it depends on the app. I mean, like games, you might be able to tell the difference, although maybe games wouldn't even run without the the discrete GPU. I don't know. Mm hmm. I don't know. This would be all right. Yeah. That was a good one. Cool. Yeah. A listener, Michael brings us a he says in the last episode or two episodes ago, Tony asked about two factor authentication for Apple devices. Have you considered an app called unlocks UNL OX as a possible solution? It's not true to factor authentication in that you can still log into your Mac using just a password, but it might satisfy some requirements. He says it uses an iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch over Bluetooth as the other device to manually lock and unlock your Mac using Face ID or Touch ID. You can also set it to automatically lock and unlock when your eye device is out of Bluetooth range. You can set the required range. This is particularly useful in an office environment where if you're like me, you always forget to lock your Mac when you wander off for a coffee. Unlocks is available on the Mac App Store for three ninety nine and the eye device companion app is free. That's pretty good. I have not messed with that these days. Of course, it's only me in my office, so I'm not too worried about it. But that is that's interesting. That's pretty cool. I might have to I might have to check that out the next time I visit you, John, to make sure that you weren't snooping on my on my laptop. When I get up to walk away for a tea or something. Oh, I am. Yeah, I know. That's the problem, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's my network, so I can I can look at what I want. Yeah, yeah, I mostly I'm that part I'm aware of. So pretty much everything I do when I'm at your house is on and on a VPN, because, I mean, you know, because I because I get it. It's your network like who am I to who might have think that you wouldn't be snooping. So we talked about and asked about drawing apps in Episode 816 as well. And we got lots of responses for this next one. Bob was, I think the first in your mind's less. He says, draw IO, draw dot IO, which was renamed to diagrams.net has a web version as well as a desktop version, of course, at diagrams.net. And then there's also now a Mac app that can be found at GitHub. We'll put links in the show notes for all of these things. Thank you, Bob. That's great. Alison Sheridan over from Podfeet said, chimed in for the same thing and said that she's used draw IO, aka diagrams.net for a long time and even has a blog post about it, which and did a screencast online tutorial about it. So we'll link to all of that stuff. She did all those when it was still called draw.io. So draw.io and diagrams.net are the same thing they are. It was just a renaming of it because it really is more about diagramming, I think, than just, you know, sort of freehand drawing. But I could be wrong about that. So we will we'll put all that in the show notes and off you go. And then one last one from Macklin was an intaglio, I-N-T-A-G-L-I-O. I'm not sure if I'm going to pronounce this correctly by purgatory design. Macklin's review is almost as good as MacDraw was. So take that for what it's worth. At the time, MacDraw was pretty, pretty impressive. So so maybe maybe that's what Macklin means. So thank you for sharing that, everybody. Good stuff. Any other cool stuff found from you, John, before we get into some questions and that sort of thing? Not yet. Not yet. All right. You know, I want to I usually do this at the end of the show, but I figured this week I'll do it right here. I want to take a minute and thank everybody whose premium contributions have come into our MacGeekGab premium program in the past week. That's all at macgeekgab.com. You can learn all about it. There are ways to contribute one time. You can contribute monthly. You can contribute every six months. We try to make it easy. This was a program generated by, well, by your requests over the years, many of you, but certainly not all of you. And it's not required. This is totally voluntary. Said you wanted to, you know, help out in a more direct financial way. So obviously supporting our sponsors, visiting our sponsors, and we'll get to those a little bit later in the show, helps us immensely. Sending in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found to places like feedback at macgeekgab.com helps us immensely. Right. So yes. Did I hear you right, Dave? Did you say feedback at macgeekgab.com? That's right. I said feedback at macgeekgab.com because that helps us immensely. And then, you know, those of you that wanted to go the extra step, we created this premium program and you get a different email address. You get premium at macgeekgab.com and we we try to address those first. So in the last week, we have seen contributions come from and we would like to thank Steven from Costa Mesa, Everett from Marina, Olga from Bellevue, Jason from Charlestown, Gary from Babylon, Luanne from Albuquerque, Tony from Chicago, Ward from Mesa, Paul from Fishers, Mark from Milford, Michael from Whitbine, Neil from West Hartford and Francis from Putney. Thanks to all of you. You really, really rock and and thanks to everybody that's that's part of the program, but really thanks to everyone who's just listening. That's that's really step one. And that's that's the biggest part of of this whole thing. So let's get to some of those questions, shall we, Mr. Braun? Indeed. OK, Barry will kick us off here with these today. He says, I have kind of a philosophical question. I've got a new 5K iMac with a three terabyte fusion drive. I've got a Drobo that has 11 terabytes of storage and both ChronoSync and Q Recall that can back up to my Drobo. My two terabyte Firewire hard drives are retired due to size. So I currently have an external six terabyte Mercury Elite Pro with USB 3.1 and eventually we'll get a newer external. In the meantime, which backup would be better to do on the existing six terabyte external time machine or carbon copy cloner? And I'd be curious as to why sitting here on lockdown. I only have myself to debate with. And frankly, things got heated and the sides are no longer speaking with each other. As an aside, what size drive would you consider appropriate for the three terabyte fusion for time machine and or for carbon copy cloner? All right. So, John, I think we're happy to join in the debate. And then maybe maybe we'll still be talking at the end of this. Do you think? Mm hmm. All right. So honestly, I would take that six terabyte external and carve it up and do both time machine and carbon copy cloner on it. And maybe I just cleared the room and nobody's talking to anybody anymore. I don't know. But here's the thing about carving up backup space. Just because you have a three terabyte boot drive doesn't mean that you need to carve out three terabytes or even more than three terabytes for your backup. You only need enough room on your backup for the amount of actual data that you're going to be backing up. Now, if you're someone that's going to fill up your boot drive, then you should have at least that much space, if not actually quite a bit more. Maybe, you know, I always go for 50 percent more than for time machine, I go 50 percent more than the data that I'm backing up for carbon copy cloner. I aim for that. But if I hit 20 or 30 percent, that's OK, because their safety net works a little bit differently and I'm OK with it. But you could go with no larger if you don't need to use the safety net and are just going straight at it. So that's where, you know, carving this up is going to be a little bit interesting where it gets even more interesting is that carbon copy cloner will require its destination to be APFS because you're backing up a Catalina volume and in order to have a bootable clone, it must be APFS time machine. However, we'll back up APFS from APFS volumes, but only to HFS plus currently we haven't seen that change yet. So you're going to be building and it's doable. You're going to be building a partitioned external and you can do it with with I guess you do it either way. It doesn't really matter. But you will have volumes of different types on this external drive. So so you do need to be a little bit thoughtful ahead of time. You can't just sort of throw caution to the wind and say, YOLO, I'll do the APFS thing and adjust on the fly because you don't really get that flexibility yet because time machine's involved. So, you know, it maybe split it down the middle and do three terabytes for each. Again, if you're only using a terabyte, terabyte and a half for your, you know, on your boot drive, you don't need to worry that it could be bigger. I mean, down the road, maybe. But I think you're all right. John, what do you think? My strategy is I would say the same. I do both. So on both my machines, I have a one terabyte SSD. Carbon copy cloner, I back up to a one terabyte SSD. OK, but time machine, what I do is I typically allocate about twice the space of the capacity of the drive. So I carve out two terabytes on the Synology to do the time machine thing. Sure. It makes sense just to have some breathing room. Yeah, because I tend to like to hold on to my time machine backups for a while because it's time machine. That's what it does. That's a point. I don't want to go back in time. Right. For a carbon copy cloner, the primary goal is to have a bootable backup. Yeah. So that's interesting, right? Is is you could. So if I take your scenario, Barry, and sort of apply what I'm doing to it and I don't necessarily, you know, preach that you need to do exactly what I'm doing, but I'll share with you what I'm doing, which I have a setup similar to yours in that I do have direct attached drives. But I also have, like you said, John, a Synology attached to the network. Actually, I've got a couple of them as you folks know. And a Drobo like you do, Barry, time machine doesn't have to be stored on a direct attached drive to have all the benefits of time machine. Carbon copy cloner does need that. You can't create a bootable backup to a piece of the media, like like your NAS or whatever, that's not bootable in and of itself. So you could say, all right, look, I'll carve out. Maybe you want to, you know, live live large carve out, you know, three and a half terabytes for your clone so that you know, no matter what happens in the future, you've always got enough room to clone and then have another two and a half terabytes as just a local data volume. And and that might be even better. I mean, that Mercury Elite Pro, it's going to be pretty fast storage. It might even be faster than your internal storage with the fusion drive. So maybe on that data volume, you'd want to put like your photos library where the speed of the media really makes a difference in terms of the performance of the library. So having that, you know, on fast storage, you know, if it's an SSD, great, you know, that that's even better. So maybe maybe that's the way to look at it. Well, I like this. This is why we discuss these things, because when John and I are alone in our, you know, little little offices doing these answering these questions, we don't have each other to bounce this stuff off of. And so it's good. I like this. Any more thoughts on that one, John? You know, there's some swirling around in my head here is that Time Machine is normal. I'm trying to remember. This is a tip we got a while ago is that I thought there was a way you could boot from a Time Machine backup. Oh, yeah. Magic keystroke. So it doesn't it's not coming to me now, what it what it was. All right. Well, we'll we'll dig in. You folks will dig in. You'll let us know if you find it in the chatroom. Kiwi Graham is saying that, you know, having two types of backups on the same media. So my initial suggestion of Time Machine and a carbon copy cloner, and he says it's it's it's heretic. So and I get that, right? Like if the physical drive is either stolen or or dies, you lose both of those backups. And Kiwi Graham also offers that, yes, we can boot into recovery mode from a Time Machine backup. So you would boot into recovery. Right. Right. Yeah. And then and then reformat your destination drive. And then when you get into that part of the process, that'll say, do you have anything that migration assistant should look at? And the answer is, yes, here's my Time Machine drive. So yeah, that that is the sort of one stop shop. OK, cool. Thank you. Thank you. Cool. Yeah. And Kiwi Graham is not wrong. Having two types of backups on the same drive is, you know, it brings with it some potential increased risk. So while we're on the subject of backups and specifically bootable backups, Jim asks, he says, for years, I have used both Time Machine and carbon copy cloner for backups on my Mac. This week, I received an update notification from carbon copy cloner. When I looked to see what the update included, I found this paragraph. And it says that starting in 10.15.5, which is out and current now, Apple only allows the cloning of a system volume with their proprietary APFS replication utility called ASR. And continuing on from what the release notes for carbon copy cloner say, we have found that this utility produces unreliable results when used in combination with destination disk images. So if you're backing up to a disk image, that can be a problem. This is as a result. Carbon copy cloner will no longer back up a Mac OS Catalina system volume to a disk image destination, either a sparse image or a sparse bundle. Instead, carbon copy cloner will perform data only backups to disk images. And then they explain sort of what that means. But but yeah, this is this is interesting because as we know, and if you didn't now, you'll know Catalina splits Mac OS into two volumes. You've got the read only mostly read only system volume and then the data volume with all your stuff. And for the most part, you aren't doing any customizations to the system volume. There are a few kernel extensions that need to be sort of safely copied into the system volume. But otherwise, all of your data and most if not all of your customizations live on the data volume. Carbon copy cloner is only going to back up that data volume if you're backing up to a disk image, which is something you might do if you're backing up to say, you know, your your NAS or something that's not bootable. If you're doing a bootable clone, nothing changes. I mean, actually lots under the hood change. But experientially, you still get a bootable clone and it has both system and data volumes intact, bootable. All of that is still good. It's just if you're backing up to disk images. That's the only time that it's not going to grab the system volume as part of its normal volume backup routine because volume is really to now is is the is the weird thing. So your normal direct attached disk, bootable clone is still a bootable clone and you're in good shape. Just be aware that your disk image backups will just be data volume. And quite frankly, it probably just saves you some space because you probably didn't need that anyway, because you could rebuild it and then bring your data volume in and you're good to go. So thanks for highlighting that, Jim. It's good. Any thoughts on that, John? No, never, never really got into backing up to a disk image myself. So I do it just to, you know, I call it my cold storage where when I roll to a new Mac, I take the hard drive from the old Mac and clone it to a disk image and just leave it. And it has saved my bacon at times where, you know, something if I, especially if I do migration assistant, if something didn't copy over correctly or if like there, you know, if I just delete something and I don't have a time machine backup old enough to get that, I know I've got it in one of my cold storage archives. So that's what I use it for. But for that, this is quite, as I said, even better because I'm not using space for the system volume that I can that I would never need for that use case. So yeah. All right. More, John, we've got questions. It's good. Yes. OK. Jonathan asks or tells us I have a problem that I can't seem to properly Google when I'm working. I have two large screens screens attached to my Mac mini. I will have five to 10 apps open, but they hide. So if I'm working in Word and I want to open Safari, I have to hunt for it. Most times it is down at the bottom of one of my screens or behind something, clicking on the Safari icon in the dock doesn't do anything to help identify itself. Command Tab doesn't make it pop up or even bring it to the front. It seems to me that I used to click on a dock icon and the program would come to the fore. Am I wrong? Did I change a setting? Is there an app that can make an app call attention to itself on the screen when I click on the dock icon? So this is one of those strange ones. Certainly when I click on dock icons here, it brings the app to the forefront. That is the way Mac OS is supposed to work. So I would say, yeah, you've got something going on. And he signed he offered some more context. John, he says it's happening on multiple Macs, or at least two of his Macs. So that tells me he's got something running or some setting in a, you know, that consistent between the two of those that's doing it. So the first thing I'd try is a separate user account and see if that still happens. Also, boot into Safe Mode in your user account and see if that still happens. That would be the, like I said, it seems like some weird configuration issue or some app that's running. So digging into what apps you have, if Safe Mode works on your main user account, then you know that it's some app that's launching and you can look in system preferences, users and groups, login items and also using something like Lingon to see all the things that don't appear in login items. So those are my thoughts, John, what are yours? I don't have much more. Yeah, that's definitely not normal behavior. So but trying to figure out what's causing that. Well, you describe, you know, the steps you should take. Those are the steps. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know, man. It's craziness. It's craziness. We want the right window to come forward. Yeah, I just wonder, I mean, something like, you know, some of these Finder modifiers like Pathfinder comes to mind. I wonder if he's running something like that. That could be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that shouldn't affect how the dock works. But well, I mean, and I, you know, shouldn't. I don't. It could, though. I know the dock and the menu bar are tied to each other, right? They don't they run in there's some relationship between the dock and the system UI server process that sort of do both of those things. So if it if it's happening a hundred percent of the time, then I'm not sure this would help. But if you have a problem with the dock and you want to but it's only happening intermittently, go to the terminal and type kill all KILALL all, you know, without spaces and no caps space. And then dock with a capital D that will kill the dock. And then Mac OS would relaunch it, you know, again, I'm not sure that that is the that's the solution here, but just in a general sense, you know, we'd like to we'd like to hit those five things. So maybe that's maybe that's one of them for one of you. So I don't know. That's what I got. We talked about routers in the last episode, John. Should we answer a question about Wi-Fi and routers and that sort of thing? Cool. Listener Brian brings us this one and he says. Uh, listening last week triggered a question regarding router and Wi-Fi speeds. I'm using Comcast and paying for their 200 gigabyte gigabit download tier 200 megabit. It's not 200 gigabits. We wish. Right. But 200 megabit download tier. I have a small app called Wi-Fi signal status monitor installed on my MacBook Pro that presents the megabits per second and SNR signal to noise ratio of the selected Wi-Fi signal. I used to see 1300 megabit per second link speeds regularly when using my old Netgear router. I had solid 230 megabit per second downloads from various speed test sites over Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, the router quit working and I replaced it with a TP-Link Archer AX1800, which has Wi-Fi 6. With the new router, I am lucky to get 170 megabit per second download speeds and the indicated link speed tops out at 867 megabits per second. My question is how important is the link speed and what should I expect in order to get decent download speeds? Brian followed up and said that his download speeds actually recovered even on the new router. It must have been a time of day thing or something like that. And I'll say maybe, but it could be related to this router. So let's talk about these data rates when you look either in an app like this or if you option click on the Wi-Fi menu in your menu bar, you'll see a TX rate. And this is where things get a little interesting. This is the rate that your Mac is using to transmit its data up to the router. The receive rate, which you don't see on your Mac, at least not in any of these places, is the rate at which the router is sending back to you. But the TX rate is a good indication of what the signal quality looks like. So it's a valid metric and it often is going to be symmetrical, right? You're going to have the same in both directions, but not always. So what does this mean though and why was he seeing 1300 with his old router and 866, 867 with his new router? And the reason comes down to the number of streams or antennas that the router uses for each radio. On an 802.11ac, or as we call it now Wi-Fi 5.5 connection, which is what his Mac does, those streams are each worth 433 megabits per second. So two of those, doing simple math, gets us to 866, 867. Three of those gets us to 1300. Your old Netgear router was what is commonly called a 3x3 router, meaning that at least the 5GHz radio had three antennas, maximizing the, you know, getting you up to 1300. Your new router, the speeds listed in its name, AX1800, are including the potential speeds of a Wi-Fi 6 connection, but it is only a 2x2 router. So at Wi-Fi 5, you're getting 433 per stream or 867. So that's why you're seeing that now. 867 is more than 200. And so you should get 200 and as Brian wrote in, yes, he in fact does. But even when you're only connecting to two streams, and you know, his Mac is clearly a capable of doing three streams, because otherwise it would not. His iPhone, because we know, is only capable of two streams. So when you had that Netgear router, your iPhone was only connecting to two radios at a time, not three. But here's the interesting part. Your router could pick which of the, your router and the iPhone together, could pick which of those two antennas it was connecting to, to maximize the signal, because the antennas on a router are sort of aimed in different directions. We call this beamforming, or at least it's a part of beamforming, deciding which antennas are best for any given client of the router. So even if you have all 2x2 devices, right, so most Apple devices are 2x2. All your iPhones, your iPads, I'm pretty sure your iPads are 2x2. The iPad Pro might be 3x3, but I don't think so. Your MacBook and MacBook Air are 2x2. Your MacBook Pro is 3x3, as is your iMac. And I'm pretty sure the Mac Mini is also 3x3. So even if you have only 2x2 devices, you might do better having a 3x3 router, or even a 4x4 router, because you're getting antennas that are aimed in the right direction. And the narrower you can aim that beam, the further it goes, right? Wi-Fi is capable of going miles if you use 2 dishes that are, you know, perfectly aimed at each other, focusing that beam. In our homes, we're not focusing because we're moving our devices around. So we need to have things widespread a little bit more. The wider it has to spread, the shorter the distance, right? So if you've got 4 antennas, they can each focus a little bit tighter than you could if you only had 3 or 2, so you can get further and better range. That's just how physics works, at least in our timeline, right, John? Any thoughts on that? Did I get, I know you, you, you're actually much better at this stuff than me. So what, like, what did I get wrong or is there any questions? I don't know, I think you got it. The magic answer is 433. Once you know that number, then all the other stuff kind of falls into place. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And I'm trying to pull up, what are Wi-Fi 6 speeds? I always forget this. We don't do enough Wi-Fi 6, even though we, you don't have a Wi-Fi 6 device yet, right, John? I don't think so. Okay. Well, you didn't get the SE, right? Because the SE is, is Wi-Fi 6 capable. Right. Okay. And no. I don't. And no, yeah, okay. I'm just trying to look quick, stream speeds. To give some context as to what's happening on Wi-Fi 6 with those. And Wi-Fi 6 is weird because it uses, Wi-Fi 5 is only using 5 gigahertz, whereas Wi-Fi 6 will work on 2.4 gigahertz. This, the signaling stream is, is signaling, the OFDM signaling that they use for Wi-Fi 6 can be done on both 2.4 and 5 gigahertz. So in the chat room, thank you very much. Brian and Rose writing generally, Wi-Fi 6 has a base speed of 1.2 gigabits per second or 1200 megabits per stream per antenna. So hence a dual stream connection has a ceiling of 2.4 gigabits and a quad stream one whopping 4.8 gigabits. In the world of wireless data transmission, the real world sustained rates are always much lower, of course, than the ceiling. So thank you for that. That's great. Okay, so way faster using OFDM than whatever signaling Wi-Fi 5 was using. So thanks for that heads up. So yeah, 433 versus 1200, it's potentially three times faster with Wi-Fi 6. So again, the ceilings are not indicative of future performance. I feel like Sarbanes-Oxley needs to get involved in our Wi-Fi discussions or something. We'll get some paperwork, I'm sure, John. And go from there. All right, well, this is one of our favorite subjects though, so we're going to stick with it sort of. David has a question about upgrading internet and ask. He says, inspired by 817, I am considering changing my network. Currently, there are four users in the house with numerous laptops, iPhones and TVs, and I find the experience satisfactory. Okay, great. If it ain't broke, fix it till it is scenario. Our favorite, he says we have Xfinity 200 blast internet service, the same as the previous, the same as Brian, and generally see down speeds in the range, in that range with an upload speed of around 12. That's correct. Yeah, the Comcast is technically 200 down and 10 up, I think on that plan and they over provision things so that you have a little bit of ad room. He says our modem is several years old, and we're using TP-Link's Deco for our mesh. We had some early troubles with Deco and keeping the mesh network stable, but for the past few years, it's worked very well. We're considering canceling the television service from Xfinity and just keeping internet to stream video. We can keep that same plan for about 88 bucks a month, which includes the modem rental. This seems to be the easiest approach because we're not changing anything. Fair. My questions, does it make sense to switch to Google Fiber for about $70 a month? I'm just going to answer it. Well, the second question is, do we rent or buy a different modem or should we? And number three is any concerns with the Decos? So I'm going to answer his first question first. If you can get 200 down and 10 up or 12 up for 88 bucks a month, or you can get gigabit down and gigabit up with Google Fiber for 70 bucks a month, or even half that. I think there's places where they offer half that. I would jump on that in a heartbeat. I don't know about you, Mr. Braun, but that'd be the first thing I'd do after I finished recording this episode. Yeah? Yeah, unfortunately, I don't know what the deal is with fiber in my neighborhood. Because out my window, I can see wires, Dave. And actually, one day, I actually got the zoom lens on my camera and I zoomed in on this one device and I'm like, what is this thing? Apparently, there is fiber running on my poles here, but it doesn't seem to be a consumer level offering. Because I looked at the webpage of the company that said they owned it and I tried calling them and nobody would answer the phone. So yeah, I don't know. Yeah, our best option here is probably optimum at this point. Yeah, for cable, right? Yeah, we're in the same boat here. I have it on my calendar every three months to check in with all the potential fiber providers that would hit my area. And it's always an effort that results in disappointment, but I keep at it anyway because I certainly want to be on that train if possible. Yeah, actually, I'll take it back. They do offer something I think they call it light path, but it's not really a consumer service. OK, from what I can tell. So I think I could get fiber, but I paid dearly, right? So yeah, we just got to wait for Google or someone else to. Yeah, Verizon has Fios as well. But not again, not here, but yeah, they've got it. So so yes, absolutely, it makes sense to switch to Google fiber. If you're going to stay with your your cable modem, should you rent or buy a different modem? Yeah, I think if my math is right and yours is the same as mine, David, 88 bucks a month includes your rental. And I think that rental is 14 bucks a month. So that's a significant chunk that Comcast is taking out. And over the course of a year, you know, you're almost paying 200 bucks to rent that modem for just that year. So yeah, I would highly recommend buying a modem. And if you're buying a modem today, I wouldn't buy anything that's not a DOCSIS 3.1 modem. There's two reasons for that. Number one, you may choose to upgrade to faster speeds in the future. And now you've got that. But even if you are certain you never ever would, or even if your provider doesn't offer, you know, DOCSIS 3.1 speeds, all DOCSIS 3.1 modems are backwards compatible to 3.0. But there is one thing that Cable Labs, the people that certify all these things, mandated in DOCSIS 3.1 modems. And that is to fix the queuing algorithm that causes all that upstream buffer bloat that we're always working with our routers to defend against. If you have a DOCSIS 3.1 modem, most of that just goes away because they implemented by mandate a better queuing algorithm. It's called DOCSIS PI, PIE. But that doesn't really matter. It's in all of them. And it's throughout the entire modem. It's not just for 3.1 connections. So your 3.0 connections benefit from that same queuing algorithm way better, way more efficient. So with that, there's basically three DOCSIS 3.1 modems to look at right now. There's the Ares surfboard 8200, which when I checked was $149 on Amazon. There's the Motorola MB8600, which was $159 at Amazon. And now there is the Netgear CM1200. They used to have the CM1000, which is actually the one that I'm currently using. I've tried all three of these. I've not tried the 1200 yet. But the 1200 is $199 at Amazon. So it's the most expensive. It replaces the CM1000, which is about the same price as the others, like $150. But the CM1000 is harder to find. The difference is that the CM1200 allows for multi-port aggregation on the WAN side. Okay. What does that mean? Well, my gigabit connection from Comcast is actually faster than a gigabit. It's 12, like 1.21 gigabits or a gigawatts, right? I think we got the flux capacitor in there or something. But anyway, the only thing to connect to my cable modem, from my router to my cable modem, I just have a single gigabit connection. So it doesn't matter how fast it's coming. If it's coming in faster than that, I'm not getting it. Well, the 1200 allows you multi-port aggregation so that you can bond two Ethernet channels together on the cable modem to get you up to two gigabits per second. And then that gives you the headroom to truly get the speed that you're talking about. Your router also needs to support this. Netgear does have their combo cable modem router. I don't have the model number in front of me that does all of this internal to it as well. So if you really want to eke out that extra bit of downstream speed, that's the way to do it. But otherwise, the other cable modems operating at gigabit Ethernet are your options. And they all work well. Like I said, I've got all three of them here and have had no problems with any of them. But for whatever reason, I'm still using the Netgear one. It's still reliable. So maybe that speaks to my preference. I can't really say that there was any problems with the other ones, but Netgear had better diagnostics pages and stuff. So I think that's why I sort of settled on the Netgear one. So anyway, thoughts on cable? Anything to add about cable modems before we answer his third question, John? Now, I got the good data if and when they offer service here. But right now I bought it from, it's actually, it says cable vision on it, but it's an Eris TM-1602, which is pretty much their, I think a good choice for Doxus 3.0. It also does telephony, which I also have with them. I don't think currently, I think the tier I have right now is 200. I think they offer a 400. And I think they may offer what they call gigabit over cable. But I think this modem will do that amount of bandwidth. Okay, but it's a 3.0 modem, not a 3.1, is that right? Yeah, I'm looking at the status page and it's a Doxus 3 slash PC 1.5 telephony modem, whatever that means. So you could benefit from a Doxus 3.1 modem in terms of your queuing. Sure. I mean, in theory, if you're not having any problems with it, then maybe you're all right. So, yeah. All right, cool, fun. I got one more networking thing in the question queue here, John. And that is from Mark. And Mark asks, I was just given a three terabyte airport time capsule. It's still in the original wrapping. I have a five terabyte external drive, which I use for my time machine backups. I have Comcast internet using their built-in Wi-Fi in the router in the gateway. My cameras and my dishwasher are on the 2.4 gigahertz band. All other users connect to five gigahertz. Any thoughts on how I should best make use of this time capsule? Yeah, so if you're happy with the way things are working, I wouldn't change anything in terms of what's providing your Wi-Fi or anything like that. You know, if you're getting enough speed and things are happy connecting, how they're connecting and you've got it all sussed out, I wouldn't change it just because you have access to a new piece of hardware. And that, I can say confidently, I mostly follow myself because I have way more hardware here than I actually employ. So I might not always win at that one, but I try. My gut says to put the time capsule in bridge mode, turn off the Wi-Fi in it and use it as an ethernet connected networked time machine destination, right? But even that, you know, there's the if it ain't broke, don't fix it principle, which is different from the one I mentioned in the last question that, you know, if it ain't broke, fix it till it is. Because it's tempting to want to, you know, this shiny new, I mean, even though it's not brand new, I mean, even though it's not newly released, it is new and you could use it. But, you know, sounds like you got things working okay. Having a second time machine destination isn't a bad thing though. So you could point your max at both of them and it'll round robin between them as it's backing up. So you've got a back, you know, you've got two separate devices backing things up. Honestly, that's what I would do. That's how I would use it. What do you, what about you, John? Um, yeah, you know, I don't, when I abandoned, you know, Apple's airport, here's what I did. I actually opened it up and pulled out the drive and put it in one of my NAS devices. How hard was that to yank the drive out? On the older flat model, I think it was you had to peel off some sticker or something like that. And then you could just unscrew it and, uh, sorry, I mean, yeah, it wasn't too hard. It wasn't terrible. Got it. Yeah. And yeah. And then, you know, there was a regular old drive in there. Yeah, right. Right, right. Just pulled it out and put it, I think I put it in an enclosure. I think I threw it in my Drobo. I think it's still in there actually. Oh, that's cool. Oh, cool. Yeah. I was looking the other day, one of the drives that I have in my Drobo, Dave, is actually, I think, oh, the date on it is 2007 and it's still working. Yikes. It's a 13 year old one terabyte drive. I think a Hitachi or something like that. I don't know that that's a good idea. No. Hey, you know, I got redundancy. I mean, yeah, I guess that's true. Someday I'm, someday I'm sure it'll identify it as failing. But right, right. Yeah. All drives will fail eventually. The drive has lasted that long. Same. And like, you can read data from it. Everything's good. Well, the Drobo seems to be happy with it. I guess that's true. Someday it may revolt. Yeah, they're super picky. So, oh, well, all right. Well, cool. Great. All right, John. I want to take a minute, we have a couple more questions, including a geek challenge from me, hoping somebody can help me answer it. But I want to take a minute and talk about our sponsors for today, as promised, if that's all right with you, Mr. Braun. Fantastic. All right. Our first sponsor today is Linode. We're at Linode, L-I-N-O-D-E dot com slash M-G-G. You get a $20 credit just for signing up and being a Mackie Cub listener. Now, what can you do with that $20 credit? Well, I'll ask you, what do you want to do? Do you want to set up a WordPress server? Linode's got you. Do you want to set up a VPN server? Linode's got you. Do you want to set up an application development server? Linode's got you. You want to set up a Minecraft server? Guess what? Linode's got you. Do you like to use the terminal? Cool. Linode's got you. You can do it all right there in the terminal. Do you not want to use the terminal? Well, guess what? Linode's got you covered with their Cloud Manager interface, where you just go in, you tell it what kind of server you want to set up. It asks you some relevant questions, username, password, things about the server type that you've set up. And boom, you're good to go. You never have to touch the terminal because Linode knows sometimes you just don't want to. And that's OK. All of Linode's servers, including their $5 a month Nanode server feature native SSD storage connected to their 40 gigabit network. They use industry leading processors. These folks know what they're doing if you need a server. Linode's got you covered. So go check it out because at linode.com slash MGG, you get that $20 credit. And yes, that means that you could have four months free of their $5 a month Nanode server because that's how math works. It's pretty good. Linode.com slash MGG are thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. You know what I did this week? I installed the update to BB Edit 13.1, not just because they're a sponsor, but because I use BB Edit every day. And I am stoked. 13.1 brings so many cool things. If you've ever used Preview in BB Edit to see the results of the HTML you're editing, you definitely want to check out 13.1. They have made huge improvements. They're now using the latest version of WebKit right in there. So you're really getting accurate, fast, clean previews right there. So good. And BB Edit's preview is awesome because as you do edits, they just kind of reflect right there. So you can really see what you're doing in real time. And it's fantastic. I highly recommend it. Again, not just because this is a sponsor spot, but because they've really done a nice job with it. And one of my favorite new features of BB Edit 13.1. 13.1, did I say? Yes, I did because they have a run UNIX command command that allows you from within BB Edit to run one-off UNIX commands and then bring the text results in from those commands for processing in BB Edit. Obviously, the world is your oyster there. You can do so many different things with it. But for example, let's just say you want to pull a directory listing into BB Edit and then search it for different things. You just go and go to the text menu, choose run UNIX command and then put in like, you know, LS space dash LHAT, for example, to get all the details, you know, and then you hit OK. And then it runs it and the results of it are right there inside your BB Edit window either in a new window or right in the one where it is. You can have it replace the selection or, you know, but wherever your cursor is, like do whatever you want with it. Go check it out at barebones.com. You can download a 30-day free trial. It gives you all the features of BB Edit. And then when the 30 days is up, you decide whether that's enough for you with a not quite full feature set that you get for free or you just pay for it and then you have all the features. It's great. BB Edit at barebones.com are thanks to Barebones for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Like I said, we have we have two more questions. I'll go to Roger first and then I will offer mine as well. Roger asks us, John, he's having some trouble. He says, with regards to my Apple devices, my morning begins roughly the same. I awaken my iPhone, which was on a charger. And then I put on my Apple Watch, which was also on a charger. I then go to my MacBook Air, which was on, but asleep. The screen comes on and 75 percent of the time, the Apple Watch unlocks it as I set it up to do. The other 25 percent of the time I have to type the password on the air to get access. Why doesn't this work 100 percent of the time? Is there a secret sauce I'm missing? I've also noticed the watch and iPhone don't always appear to be linked and glued together. For instance, I always tell Siri to set a timer for four minutes after I add hot water to my French press coffee maker. Most of the time, the timer alert goes off on the phone and the watch at the same time, but not always. Like this morning, it went off on the phone, but not the watch. Any thoughts. I have a Series 3 watch, an iPhone 11 Max, but this occurred on previous phones and all that stuff as well. All are kept up to date. You're not alone, Roger. I occasionally find that my Macs are requiring me to enter passwords to, you know, newly allow my watch to unlock them. Although I think that's a little bit different from what you're experiencing here because it just times out. But, you know, in terms of the watch and the iPhone not always being linked, I've seen that too. And I have some theories about this. I think it comes down to power and battery management and that the devices aren't always, you know, blasting out their Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals. They're trying to communicate as efficiently as they can. And I've seen my watch sort of bounce between Wi-Fi and not Wi-Fi, which then means Bluetooth, or if it's a cellular watch, you know, cellular. But I think when the phone and the watch are not, like, in sync at the very moment of, like you said, an alarm going off or something like that, it's often because it's not quite, you know, things go to sleep, right? They turn off their radios so that you're not blowing through the battery all the time. I think that's what's happening here. And I think that probably makes sense with your Mac because that very much is a Bluetooth thing that the watch needs to be within range. And if the Mac's Bluetooth isn't, you know, woken up in time or the watch's Bluetooth had been asleep and didn't wake up in time, I think that's where that is. But I don't have an answer here. Unfortunately, it's, you know, live with it is basically how it is for me. You know, I know you don't have a watch, John, but or an Apple watch. I know you have a watch. But I'm, you know, curious as to your thoughts because you think about this kind of stuff and radios and batteries and all that stuff. Any thoughts on what might be going on here, hearing all these symbols? I haven't really had to diagnose a problem like this one. Sure. But if, but something that could help, I find I learn something sometimes as far as how am I, there are the bikers again. Yeah. Sorry. It's a nice day in England. It's nice weather out, so the bikers are out. But no, sometimes a hardware growler may give you a view into what's going on, at least from the Mac point of view. It's interesting. Like sometimes I'll be sitting here at my mini and even though my MacBook Pro is asleep and actually like in the other room, I'll see a little notification come up in the corner of my screen saying, Oh yeah, I connected to your machine that's sleeping via Bluetooth. And I'm like, well, why are you doing that? Yeah. And I guess part of it could be that it's, well, I don't know why, but hardware growler, maybe. That's a good idea. It may help you. Sometimes it surprises me when I see or do not see the devices using a handoff, I guess for the most part. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. I see this machine in the studio is the only machine I have hardware growler active on, because it gives me, like most of the time, I don't need to know this information. And quite frankly, even on this machine, I don't anymore. We were having a problem where our USB audio device was just resetting. Turned out, I think it was related to that whole USB chip in the OWC Thunderbolt 2 dock, wasn't the first release of it, wasn't shielded right. And so if your phone was using the right or wrong cellular frequency, it would cause some interference, it would cause a bus reset. Anyway, I needed to know what was going on. And so, you know, I asked you, I ranted about it to you, and you're like, well, what does hardware growler say? I'm like, ah, right, I need hardware growler. But I still do have it installed here. And I am always seeing Bluetooth come on and off, and on and off, like telling me, I see your iPad. I don't see your iPad. I see your watch. I don't see your watch. I see your Mac downstairs. I don't see your Mac downstairs. You know, this constant. And so these things are, you know, like I think of it as periscoping, right? Where they're just, you know, shoot the periscope up. Do I see anything? Nope. Okay. Going back down with the battery off. And that's how mobile devices in general all work now in terms of efficiency and keeping the airwaves clear and all of that stuff. So yeah, it makes sense. I buy it. I buy it. Yeah. So yeah, hardware growler may give you some of that indication. I don't know that it's the solution, but it might, I don't know. Yeah, something. John, I have a question and I don't know the answer to it. And I'll talk about the particulars of this in a future episode because I have changed some hardware devices. We're all thunderbolt audio here, by the way, now, which is sort of crazy. But I know it's great. Low latency. The latency is almost too low because I've gotten used to a little bit of a gap from USB over the years. Hearing myself on delay. Anyway, that's a good thing. I'm getting used to the lower latency again. I want to, here in the studio, I want to be able to play something on Bluetooth from my phone and have it come out of my Mac. So I want to treat my Mac like a set of Bluetooth speakers or AirPlay speakers. I don't like AirPlay would be totally fine. In fact, that sounds better. I thought there was something from Rogue Amoeba that would do this, but I looked on their site the other day and was like, no, like other direction, yes. And maybe I've missed something. So that's my geek challenge for this week is, and I'm going to dig into this more too, but how do I use my Mac as the receiver of the audio, the, you know, either Bluetooth or AirPlay audio from another device? Then I feel like I've run into this over the years, but I've never needed it myself. So I never went and like employed this type of solution. But I feel like it's got to be possible. The tech is all there. I just need to, you know, glue it all together. So I don't know. Anything come to mind, John? Right? Um, so on the Mac, if you go to the Bluetooth system preference from, I've been fiddling with some of this stuff as well, but if on the Mac you go to the Bluetooth preference, I think that then makes it discoverable, right? Uh-huh. Yeah, this is really dangerous, too. I mean, have you done that and then, and then, oh yeah, you may not want to do it now, but um. That would be a bad time is what you're saying? Yeah. That is true. I do see like iMac Studio listed in my thing. Huh. Yes. There is something to explore here, John. You're not wrong. I'm not going to do it right now because it's fraught with opportunity for disaster of resetting the audio bus. And let's just say that with my recent experiments, I've been doing enough of that already. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was fiddling with that when I got those planetronic earbuds and I was trying to make them a destination for the sound from my Mac. Sure. The thing is they marry very easily with the phone, but it wasn't entirely obvious, and they have an app for the phone. Sure. But it wasn't entirely obvious to me whether I could make them a destination from my Mac, but I was able to once I put them in discovery mode. Huh. Advertise mode. Then they showed up as an audio option on my Mac. But that was still outbound from the Mac. But your point is valid. There's something here because it certainly was showing up that way. Yeah. Okay. All right. This is something to do because what I want to do is be, and look, I've solved this problem one way. I like to, my entire audio setup in the studio is now all driven thunderbolt from my iMac, including all of my microphones that I would use for band rehearsal and everything like that. And so what I want to do is sit at my drums over there and play music into my headphones, which are connected by a variety of things to my Mac. Because that way I can also hear the mics from my drums, which is kind of nice to hear when I'm playing them. And I'm spoiled, but it's quarantine time. So it was time to sort of rejigger things. And I can use the iTunes remote app to control iTunes on my Mac from over there. So that's great. Like if I want to play along with songs or whatever. But if I have something that someone sent me or whatever, and it's not yet in Apple Music, and it's not synced around, I just want to be able to stream it from my phone to either my headphones or speakers or whatever I've routed six ways from Sunday here in the studio, which now I can do. So that's where this comes from. But yeah, it would be nice to treat my Mac. And I could use like one of those various, you know, there's those devices. The SmartBean was one, I don't think it exists anymore, that allow you to convert essentially your wired headphones into Bluetooth headphones, because it's just a Bluetooth receiver with a headphone port on it. So that, you know, that works fine. And I could plug one of those into my Mac and let it just be like the thing. Or AudioEngine makes a device that's even better for that, right, with higher quality Bluetooth codecs and things like that. So I could do that, but now I'm burning up two inputs on my Mac that shouldn't need to be burned. I could just go wireless, direct to the Mac, because like I said, all the tech exists. So these are the things I think about when I'm sitting here not answering questions, and you know, but it's good because I play my drums every day, and that's good, you know. So anyway. All right. I think you broke one of your drums, didn't you? Oh, I did. Yeah, I broke. Yeah, it's weird. I've never, like it died. The last time I broke a bass drum head was in 1995 in normal Illinois. But I broke one yesterday. It bass drum heads typically don't break. But what had happened was the beater on my bass drum pedal, the thing that, you know, connects with and hits the head. It's always hitting the same spot of the head. It had worn down over probably, you know, two or three years. And evidently on that particular beater, as it wears down, there's like a nub inside where the felt would be. And as the felt sort of compressed and wore down, the nub became the thing that was sort of pointing and hitting exactly the same spot on the bass drum again, probably it's probably been like that for six months, hitting it exactly the same spot, you know, with that little nub, instead of it being a, you know, a circular inch that is being hit. It's now, you know, like a little point. That's all it took. It just went right through it. So if I had been gigging using this kit for gigging, I would have noticed it because, you know, putting it in and out of cases, I've been like, oh, that's bad. And honestly, even just taking the head and rotating it would have bought me more time. But buying a new beater was the thing. But this isn't giggab. So if you're into this kind of stuff, listen, giggabpodcast.com. That's a show I do with Paul Klint every week. But, you know, anyway, that's, yeah, I did. I broke the basement. I just thought it was funny. I saw it on your Facebook. I think you posted. Yeah. It was a shock to me. It was like, what's going on down here? Like, why is my, what's happening? It's like, oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, I had a spare head. I had a spare beater. You know, it always replaced. I had a conference call about 30 minutes later. And the person I was on the phone with wanted to talk my ear off about something, which was fine. It was great. And it's always nice to connect with a human. And I thought, well, this is a perfect opportunity. So while I was talking, I came up here to the studio and I pulled the bass drum out and pulled the spare head out and changed the head and put it back. And, you know, it's like, it was like a pit crew in here. But the one man pit crew because, you know, social distancing, all that stuff. All right, which is slowly ending here in New Hampshire, which will be. Yeah, same here. Yeah, yeah. Rather letting people do more stuff. Yeah. By the end of this month, overnight camps can reopen, which is interesting with restrictions and things like that. But like restaurants can do indoor seating starting, I think in a week, maybe a week and a half. Like, yeah, yeah, I saw that too. Yeah. All right. Where are we here? We got we got time. Oh, Robert follows up from a previous episode with a great little tip. Actually, I don't know that this one is from a previous tip, but maybe. Robert says, I thought I'd drop you guys a quick note regarding Apple music that I didn't know. I figure other listeners might also be just in the dark. I've become low on storage on my 256 gig 2017 MacBook Pro. And so I ran Daisy disc to see what some of the main culprits were in order to either move them to my cold storage drives or just nuke them completely. In doing so, I found an Apple music cash folder named subscription play cash that I'd never stumbled on before. And the folder had grown to over four gigs of data. A little Google Foo brought me across an article that shows exactly where to find this and explains that it is safe to just delete. Indeed, perhaps this is common knowledge that I've missed out on, but no, not at all. I download blog published a great article that we'll link to about digging in and clearing out this folder. It is truly just a cache of all the things that Apple music pulls down. The way Apple music works is it needs to pull down the entire file before it can start playing on your Mac. So it's when you're streaming stuff, it's not actually streaming. It's pulling it down and playing it. And it's in a proprietary format and, you know, all of that stuff, of course. But but it does need to save it somewhere. And it tends to keep things around just in case. So, yeah, good, good. All right. What else do we have here, John? I've got some where where am I? Yeah, you know what, Scott's the one that I thought we were doing because I confused myself here. But I'm glad to have done Roberts. And now I want to do Scots. We talked in Episode 814, John, about looking into the Bill of Materials files. And Scott gives us some heads up on how to get in there. And he says, to read the dot BOM files, you use the LSBOM command from the terminal. And that's all lowercase, no spaces. He says to and to list the contents, for example, you you do LSBOM and then just the name of the file. So you'd go maybe to, you know, the private var DB receipts folder. And then it would just, you know, barf it all out there and you can pipe the output through a thing like less, if that makes sense to you from the terminal, or you can just barf it all out and scroll around in the terminal to see what it all was. And so it is part of the BOM command tree, I guess, because man BOM is the is the key. So it will it will show you and then you can do man LSBOM to get more details on that. So thank you, we'll put we'll put a, you know, a little bit of terminal food in the in the show notes to, you know, just to give you something to start with. But fun little command. Thank you, Scott LSBOM. Have you messed with this yet, John? No, no, okay. We talked about, well, Matt, you know, we've been talking about backing up and all that stuff and we've got time for a couple more here, John. So Matt reminds us that this is a good time to kind of dig into some things. He says, my, my MacBook Pro has been running hot for a while now. I finally got tired of hot legs while working at home and dug into what was causing it. It turned out to be two things, Clam X AV and Resilio Sync. Clam X was an easy fix. It was set to scan any volume that was connected to my laptop. So every time I plugged into my hub, it mounted my arc backup volume and the processor would go through the roof scanning all the hundreds of thousands of files on the volume. I turned that off and now Clam X is much happier. He says, I'm talking to them to see if there's a way to have it ignore a certain volume when it's mounted, but still scan other things like thumb drives I pick up in the parking lot. Just kidding. Yeah, that's not such a good idea. Resilio Sync, he says, was a bigger problem. This used to be called BitTorrent Sync, but it is the peer to peer syncing engine that you can run on all kinds of different platforms. It's great. We recommend it in a lot of different ways. He says, I've used Resilio Sync for many years and had it syncing five different folders to my home server. One of the problem, one of the folders has about 200,000 files in it. And Resilio would ramp up the processors to almost 200%. The fans would kick in and my legs would cook. Synology drive to the rescue, he says. This morning I disabled Resilio Sync and added that folder to a second sync in Synology Drive. It is now in the middle of its initial sync just past 165,000 files and is only using 7.3% of my CPU. No fan, no cooked legs and one less syncing app taking up memory because he already had Synology Drive running. He says, I think it's a big win. I thought I would share. No, you're right about that, Matt. I have worked very hard to narrow down how many syncing apps I let run on my Mac. And Synology Drive has been sort of the place to go because with Synology Drive I was able to remove both Dropbox and Google Sync from my Mac. And I think Box if I wanted to but I don't use Box because I can use Synology's Cloud Sync to let my disk station sync with Dropbox and Google Drive and all of that. And then Synology Drive is the thing that syncs just to my Mac or my iOS devices or any of that. Not only does it mean I have only one sync app on my Mac but it also means that I don't have to use up a license seat on Dropbox. I can still use my free Dropbox account on six Macs if I want because it's only in fact the one sync that Synology's doing doesn't even use up a seat. So I have I think zero seats used. I might have Dropbox enabled on one of my iPads somewhere in a native way but otherwise everything else just uses Synology Drive. So yeah, it's pretty good. Thoughts on that one, Mr. Braun? I should probably revisit what I'm running. Though I recently moved over to Drive and I like it. Yeah. Yeah, on both my machines I back up pretty much. I think my entire home directory or most of it. Okay. Anyways, yeah, I send over to the Synology. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. That's good. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean these are good projects to do during our quarantine times here but I've been very happy for the most part with Synology Drive. It has its quirks. I had one of my Macs for about two weeks was just obsessed about syncing like a folder of like 200,000 files to its credit. And just like Matt said, it did not chew up my CPU or anything but just seeing it going through all those files that most of which had been there for years and it didn't need to do was a little bit frustrating. I had to let it do it twice and now it's fine until the next time it does it. But no, these are syncing things. They need to rebuild their indexes, I suppose. I feel like there might be a better way but nothing's perfect, it turns out. But this episode has felt pretty good, John. And I feel like we are at the end, my friend. Do you have anything else to add before we say goodbye here? No. Well, you know, I did promise that we would read some of our recent reviews so you can come to macgeekab.com slash reviews to leave your reviews. But we've got some here that have come in recently. One from John the Mac guy from the United States who says best Apple podcast period. Light on the monotonous Apple corporate news and heavy on real employable tips. Mac Geekab is easily my all-time favorite tech podcast. I've been listening since 2008 and have never missed an episode. When they say the goal is to learn five new things each week, they mean it. I've learned more real-world tips and tricks from listening to John and Dave than I ever could have from reading blogs, books and magazine articles. If you're longing to get more from your Mac iPad and or iPhone, this is the podcast for you. He also notes that he might want one of those super cool Mac Geekab coffee mugs he's seen photos of. So maybe there's another quarantine project for us, John. J.S.C.H. Mania from the United States says a great podcast that I have been listening to for years and it only gets better. John and Dave are very informative. Thank you so much for these reviews. They keep coming in and we really appreciate it. It helps that just the consistency of reviews really, really helps us. Please, please, if you haven't left a review in the last six months or so, go to macgeekab.com slash reviews and leave one. You can update your old review and I've seen some of those too, which is fantastic. So thank you so much everybody for that. Obviously, thanks to all of you simply for listening. Tell a friend about the show. If again, just like you said in the reviews, if you're getting something out of it, you might have a friend who would also get something out of it. Tell them. We would love that. It's really the best way for us to grow. Post about it on Facebook or Twitter or just call somebody up and tell them. Maybe they'll be changing a bass drum head and have lots of time to listen. You could even play them a snippet of the episode. I don't know. I'm spitballing here. Yeah, that's what we got. Thanks to Cashfly for getting, for the bandwidth that gets the show from us to you. Thanks of course to our sponsors that we had in the episode. Of course, barebones.com with BB edit and lino.com slash M G G and our other sponsors. Of course, smile software.com slash podcast. Other world computing at max sales.com. Eero.com slash M G G and several others coming on board too. Business seems to be picking up. People are figuring it out. Which is excellent. That's good. Any more thoughts, John? No. Nothing, huh? I have one. Oh, one? Well, it's one thought in three words. Like, I can, I can name that thought in three words. You know what, you know what those words are, John? No. Don't get caught. And we're out.