 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, Episode 765 for Monday, June 10th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We mix it all together with the goal being that we each learn five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Eero, BB Edit, and Linode. And we'll talk about why you want to visit each of those shortly here. We've got some deals for you and some cool stuff, of course. But for now, here back here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Freeville, Connecticut, this is John Fron. How are you doing today, Mr. John Fron? Adequate. Well, Adequate's good. I am. I am. I feel like I am home and yet even more home because, you know, I've been having these weird throat problems and and I have a feeling it might have to do with both my body mechanics relating actually back to Bell's Palsy from, you know, listeners that have been with us for a decade plus might remember when half my face stopped working, which mostly recovered, of course. But I changed my studio around about eight months ago and that I'm feeling like given some other factors that I have, you know, been able to isolate and things like that. I wonder if having my microphone moved from my left side to my right side changed anything. So I am back home with my microphone on my left side. It's not quite home yet. I haven't completely changed the rest of the workstation. So there's still some things off on the right. But it's nice having my mic on the left. It's good. Hey, we have a bunch of quick tips, including one from Craig Federighi, believe it or not. So I well, you know, that's that's because I was I was at WWDC and and I paid attention to Craig. And he actually he shared something that was well, it was, you know, like the type of thing that we take for granted and yet is a quick tip. But I want to start with Graham, if that's OK by you, Mr. Braun. Oh, yeah, he's out, Craig. Yeah, yeah. So Graham says, I just discovered this click option. So I'm not sure if it's well known. It's another case of the user interface not indicating that a different type of click gives a different feature in the Safari tab bar at the far right is the plus symbol to add a new tab. If you right click or press and click or long click on that plus sign, it gives you a list of recently closed tabs to choose from. This is the same list as is available from the menu bar under history recently closed with, of course, minor presentation differences. Thank you so much for that, Graham. I had no idea that that existed. So this is this is what we love about the quick tips, man. It's good stuff that you know about that one, John. Now, I've actually been using this one lately because normally, and I was scratching my head over how else you could do this. I think there's another way you could do this. No, I noticed as of late, you know, I had certain tabs that was open in in Safari and, you know, for whatever reason, I had to restart my machine. And of course, you know, you restart and you lose all that. But not if you know this, I was just going to say, not necessarily. That's right. Yeah, but I think you can also do this. So I'm looking in the in the preferences general and then the first choice there in Safari, Safari opens with one of the choices is all windows from last session. So I wonder if that would also that would do it for you. Yeah. Yeah. And we were oh, you're finding that in where are you? Safari preferences. And Safari preferences, general. Yeah. First thing on the top there, Safari opens with. Ah, yes, right, right, right. There we are. This machine is still running. This machine is still running high Sierra. So the prefs are a little bit different. But yeah, you're right. You can have it open with all your tabs from the last session. And and then and then you don't lose that stuff, which is super handy. I kind of like that most of the time. I kind of like that. So, yeah. See, there you go. Two quick tips in one. It's good, right? I think so. Oh, wait, there's a third one. Where did I get that? I got it from our chat room, Dave. All right. Where's our chat room? Is it Mackeygab.com slash stream? And Alex says that there's also history menu. Reopen all windows from last session. So it's everywhere. Nice. Nice. All right, we have a couple of quick tips from from listener Timothy. And he says, I often hear to use activity monitor, but I have never heard any mention of the hidden. Well, not hidden. They are in plain sight additional windows. You can activate from within the activity monitor application. I fumbled through the menu bar menus for the app and took some screenshots, which I shared. He says you can open separate windows to show CPU and GPU usage and history. And these are graphs. So you can really visually see what's been happening to your CPU and GPU. He says you can also add about 25 additional data types to sort the main activity monitor app window, which is true. If you go in activity monitor to to the, where is it? It's the view columns option. You will see lots and lots of extra things out there. And we've talked about this before, like adding kind to it. So you can see if something's still a 32 bit app that's actually running. But you can, you know, look and sell. There's one actually in there, John, that I'd never noticed before, called preventing sleep, which is a handy way to take a look and see if something is keeping your Mac present. I know, that's pretty good. I had no idea that was there. That's like that. That's now going to become a permanent one for me. Look at that photo analysis team. Not only is it chewing my CPU, it is preventing sleep. I couldn't be happier about that, by the way, let's see. He says, another common, commonly overlooked, but unbelievably useful baked in tool is the paper tape for the calculator. I love that thing and often use it just so I can screenshot the window to show the math order of operations or how I came up with a sum. He says, the example that comes to mind is expensing tolls. When I lived in Austin, Texas, I used to be able to expense my tolls for work. But my toll statement didn't discriminate personal and work tolls since I am so ethical. I didn't just expense the entire statement to make it easy. Instead, I highlighted tolls that were work related and use paper tape to show the 50 plus individual line entries. I added up command shift four plus the space bar and boom. You've got a screenshot of your paper tape window to support your line item entry on your janky backup for an ethical expense report. I get Austin and tolls is a thing that is new since I left Austin, but I have to experience it when I'm down there. Yeah, very cool. Thank you so much for that, Timothy. Very good stuff. I like it. Any thoughts on any of that, John, before we move on? Tolls. Tolls. Yeah. Yeah. Austin added Austin at a toll road. It's actually kind of interesting. They added a few of them, but but one road that they added tolls to they the price of the toll is variable. And it's variable based on how full the toll lane is. If the toll lane is is relatively empty, they want you to use it to alleviate traffic. So it's very inexpensive. And if the toll lane gets full, they don't want you to use it because there's already traffic there. And so the rate goes up to discourage you from using the toll lane. That's pretty smart congestion pricing kind of. Yeah, but but like in the way that helps everyone, right? But not not in the well, if it's empty, we're going to charge you more because it's a privilege to be no, no, no, no. We want to like spread the load around so it's less expensive. Yeah, congestion pricing. Exactly. Yeah, we maybe get them too. You you think you're getting tolls back in Connecticut? Is that right? Oh, yeah. Oh, they're definitely proposing it. Well, you know, they're all they're all going on about how we're going to pay for maintaining the infrastructure. Sure. Silly stuff like that. Sure. Well, you know, I remember when they removed all the tolls from Connecticut, because I think they had a tragic accident at one of them. And they decided, yeah, that's we should probably remove those because they're they are safety. They can be. Yeah. Well, but but now if a truck crashes into it. But now with like easy pass or or it's equivalent, wherever that is, where where you are, you don't have to have. I mean, you don't even have to slow people down. You can just put a sensor over the road and boom, you're good to go. So so it'll it eliminates that that risk of of collisions when people are slowing down and that sort of thing. Yeah. Cool. All right. So Craig Federighi was on stage with John Gruber at his talk show on Tuesday night at WWDC, and I was fortunate enough to be able to attend. And it was him and Greg Josriak. And they were talking through all kinds of things. I really have found that assuming John has some Apple folks on, it is it really is keynote part three. So we have keynote part one, which is the keynote. The state of the union is keynote part two. And then Gruber's thing is keynote part three. And actually, I was talking to someone from Apple and and they said, yeah, we see it that way, too. We really kind of plan our message so that we have three opportunities to really speak to developers and that particular crowd, which was great. Um, he was talking about sending email, but really he was talking about the ease of use and and bringing new users into the platform. And he was saying, you know, the shortcut for sending email is baked into his his hands. He's like, but it's not the kind of thing that is obvious to anyone else. And it was and he mentioned the shortcut, which I'm sure is baked into many of our hands, which is command shift D. When you finish typing a message, you hit command shift D and boom, it sends it out. Well, that's a quick tip, right? I mean, he basically described exactly what we have these quick tips for those things that we do automatically that other folks may not even know are possible or may not have ever even thought of. So as soon as Craig said it, I whipped out my phone and I popped it into to our agenda there because that's like it. It's one we've never mentioned on the show here. And it's one I use all day long. I am ninety nine percent certain you use it all day long to John. If you're doing anything in mail, learn the command shift D. Do you use it, John, or are you a click to send kind of guy? No, I'm a click to send type of guy. And it's funny because I'm looking here at least on one machine. And if I go to the message menu at the very top. It says send again. Oh, that's because you're highlighting because you're so right. Command shift D. If you're if you're in a compose window is send command shift D. If you're just if a message like a read only message is selected, then it it cues it up for send again. So which is another handy thing. That's right. Yeah, a double quick tip right there. Yeah. Yeah, that can be super handy. So. Cool, Leo. And and and Brian and Roe is noting that Craig Federighi also made an appearance on Federico Vetticis. Which one is it? App stories. So we'll put a link to all of those in in the show notes because, you know, that's what we do. So those will those will be there when when we do that. Cool. All righty, moving on one last. Well, it's a correction from the last episode. And and I wanted to include it here in case we didn't get to our followups later in the in the show here. Thad notes. He says I was just listening to your most recent episode, which was the one we did last week while I was at Dub Dub. And he says and Dave mentioned that he thinks every Mac that runs Mojave will run Catalina. He says that's not or that says that's not quite true. Mojave supports the final model of the old cheese grater Mac Pro first released in 2010 with a minor update in 2012 with the caveat that the GPU has to have been upgraded to one that supports metal. The oldest Mac Pro that Catalina officially supports is the 2013 trash can. So that's really interesting and thank you for pointing that out. That obviously we want to make sure we get it right. It's odd to me that there would be a Mac that supports metal that would would would be specifically exempted from Catalina. I will be curious to learn why I tried digging when we got your note and couldn't really figure out, you know, what the technological reason was that that Apple has dropped that from the list. And who knows, maybe it still is unofficially supported. Maybe Catalina will install on it. But we don't know that possibly not, though. And in fact, quite probably not if it's not on Apple's list. So so there we go. So we shall see. But yeah, metal is is kind of the thing. And it's the thing because of what used to be called Marzipan and now Apple has called Project Catalyst, which is great because Catalyst and Catalina don't sound like each other. And and what what that is, Marzipan or Catalyst, as we call it. Now is the thing where Apple has created the libraries such that you can check the box or a developer can check the box on an iOS app that says, hey, go and compile this for the Mac. And and actually going back to Federighi's comments during the talk show, there were a lot of us that were not impressed by Apple's rollout of those four apps in Mojave that were Project Catalyst apps or Marzipan apps. And that was News, Stocks, Home. And why can I never remember the voice memos? And many of us saw those apps and said, hey, wow, these are kind of, you know, basic and not all that great. I guess there's not a whole lot to this Project Marzipan or Project Catalyst thing. Federighi sort of fessed up and said, well, you know, I think a lot of the things that people hated about those were design choices we made in while we converted those apps and not limitations of Project Catalyst. So he says Project Catalyst. And I've and I've heard this from some developers that were sort of messing with it last week after it was rolled into Xcode. And there there's quite a bit more to this than certainly than I originally thought. And I think that's true for many of us. So I am reservedly bullish on the possibilities of Project Catalyst, which is which is really a great thing because you've got all these iOS apps that can be ported over to the Mac very easily. Not it's not instantly. It's not quite as simple as checking the box. I mean, it is if you don't want to have any Mac feeling user interface elements, but but, you know, it saves a lot of work, right? And you can have that shared code base. So so anyway, very curious about that. And of course, the metal is required for Catalyst to work properly because and metal is the the Apple's tech that lets people let's developers sort of talk to APIs that are very closely tied to the GPU for lack of a more descriptive description. So, yeah, so there you go. I am, like I said, reservedly bullish on that. But any thoughts on that, John, before we move on? No, I. I give you my thoughts last time. It's a nice check. I certainly seems like it. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Cool. Oh, all right, man. I'm going to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor, John, which is Eero at Eero dot com, where coupon code promo code MGG allows you to add overnight shipping at checkout and then make it free. So make sure to use that promo code MGG when you go to Eero dot com. Eero is the mesh Wi-Fi that John and I are both currently using. And, you know, it and I have it not just in my house, but I've actually got it in my dad's house and other like friends houses and stuff. It really is, you know, it sits as I as I say all the time in the show here. It sits, you know, at the top of my list of of mesh networks. And you'd see that if you read my my article about it and that has nothing to do with them being sponsors. It has everything to do with them really, truly building good tech and continuing to improve it both both from a hardware standpoint, sure, but also very much from a software standpoint. In fact, they sort of blew me away when they added smart queuing or a smart queue management, which is their way of saying buffer bloat protection, which is a really important thing for those of us when we have things like, you know, iCloud photo libraries and backups that we're constantly sending up, it really helps keep the network running well. It's enterprise grade mesh Wi-Fi, right? Is it built for the home and made easy for the home and it truly works really, really well. And now they have all kind of mentioned they're upgrading hardware and they they do have lots of different options for you. They've got the first gen era, which is a dual radio thing. They've got the second gen era, which is a three radio device, which is great. Then they've got the beacon, which is the one that just plugs into the wall, which makes it really easy and sort of very discreet to expand your Wi-Fi mesh without having to find a place on the table or anything like that. It just plug it into a wall outlet and you're finished, right? It's that simple. They've got all the latest tech on them so that you're not missing anything. And like I said, their software is continually being updated in very meaningful ways, like it's really, really good. And Apple just last week said that Eero was on the list of those routers that would be made home kit compatible. So that's another great thing to think about. So you've got to check this out. Go to Eero.com, add overnight shipping to your cart and then use coupon code MGG to make that overnight shipping free. Very, very cool stuff. You've got to check it out and and our thanks to Eero at Eero.com for sponsoring this episode. All right, Mr. Braun, you want to take us to Leon? No, but but will you take us to Leon? OK, sweet. So Leon says this is Leon in London. And I really need your help or the help of the Mackie Gap Squad. I didn't know we had a squad. I'm having trouble thinking family, you know, a posse. What do we call the Mackie Gap family? I like it. Yeah, Mackie Gap crew. I don't know. Anyway, move on, please. See, he says I'm having trouble sinking Apple books for my 2017 MacBook Pro to multiple iOS devices and iPad Pro 11 inch and iPad mini five and an iPhone XS. This includes audio books, ePubs and PDFs. You might think this is insane, but I'm still sinking via copper wire first because it's faster for me and I like to have back up to the devices that I can then re-back up to external disks. That's the situation. Here's the problem. Each time I sink and back up a device, I have a couple of issues. Sinking books via iCloud is turned off on all devices. So the first with ePubs and PDFs, the number I have in Apple books is around 300. iTunes repeatedly tells me it will only sink 127 of them. If I open the books app, tell iTunes to stop sinking books, quit iTunes, reopen and sink. It shows me that it's sinking all 300, which it then does slowly. The documents are already on my devices, but it re-sinks them. And then with audio books, I have quite a few. This is less painful than the previous problem, but it re-sinks around 3,000 tracks each time. I've rebooted, restored all the usual tricks, but still no luck. I reckon there is a corrupt database file that I need to rebuild. Any idea which one, where it is and how to fix it. I think so. And I may have learned something here. So that's the idea, right? Five new things. My book set up, yeah. So my book set up wasn't that I don't really use books all that much, but I did have some on one machine. So I was able to do something here. Well, first, I was sinking iCloud, so I turned that off, so that I was sinking locally. And actually, I don't think it's insane what he's doing. I mean, if you get faster sinking and you can keep track of which is the master. Sure. Then, yeah, I don't see any reason you shouldn't do that. So I did send digging, because the question was, well, where is this stuff stored? And where's the database that keeps track of it? And I think I found it, Dave, in this dandy article called Where Are Apple Books Downloads Stored in Mac OS? It's over at TechReview. We know that guy. Oh, yeah, MGG Jim. That's right. Yeah. So where is this stuff stored? Well, you know, I mean, it should be obvious, but if it's not, it's stored in your home directory, library, containers, com.apple.bkagentservice data documents. And that's yeah, you go to the go to the TechReview link. You'll find it, folks. Yeah. And sure enough, I looked in there and and I saw some of my books. In addition to what we'll call the database file. So one of the files is a. Yeah, so I drove down and there's a bookstotplist file. And that's the database that you're speaking of. Because if you open that, you'll see all of the names of the documents in that directory. I'm like, oh, OK, well, I found it. But then it was funny because I didn't see as many publications as I expected, Dave. So one thing I tried to get some more documents in there is that in iTunes, if you go to file devices, transfer purchases from in the name of the device, that'll pull in additional documents. And it did that for me. Now, there's another thing too. So I don't really like the way they architect this. And it sounds like he's suffering from that because it was like he was getting different behavior depending on whether he was in iTunes or books. The other thing I noticed is that if it is in the books program, if you go to file, there's a move books from iTunes selection. Interesting. OK, well, so I did that too. And I saw more things appear in there. So my first goal was let's try to get this list as correct as I think it's possible. Sure. And once you do that, the goal being is that you get a client up to date. Right. That would make sense. And you're disintermingling yourself from iTunes, which given what we know, and that is that iTunes is being disintermingled itself, that's probably a good thing. Yeah. So once you go through all those steps, then what I did is that I'm going to eat my own dog food here. Or cat food or rat food or whatever. You don't have any rats right now. Do you? No, no, I had them intentionally in your house. I had him when I was a kid. Yeah, yeah, right. And for those that don't know, rat food is people food. That's why there's that's why they're our buddies. It's the same things we do. That's why they like to live in our houses, whether we invite them or not. Yeah. So first, Tyler's options. And then what I did, Dave, is whackedthecom.apple.bkagent-service-directory. What would happen then is the next time I tried to sync, it's like, oh, hey, by the way, there's stuff on your device that's not not here. You want me to grab that stuff? And the first time I did that, it gave some sort of error. Like, oh, I can't find the directory that is supposed to be in. Sure. But I restarted and did it again. And then it started populating that list again, including that bookstop.plist file. So hopefully that. But again, I'm not too familiar with it. And it's kind of weird how they architect this is that, you know, you could do it for iTunes, you could do it for books. And then there's a and it sounds like there's a cap here, too, which that that's the part that gets me. So I don't know. That's the best I got for you. I don't know if anybody else has any additional expertise in how to deal with your books. Let us know. Yeah, that's great, man. Yeah. Wow. Nice find. That's I had no I mean, it makes perfect sense that book that or BK agent service, which I'm assuming is short for book agent service is a thing. I just never dug into it. That's great. But that's good. If you want to let us know, feedback at mackeykev.com is where you will do that. Did you say feedback at mackeykev.com? You know, it's funny every now and then, maybe once or twice a month, we'll get an email from someone to one of our other addresses because they say they don't know what the email address of the show is. And we were talking about that at the meetup that we had in San Jose last week. And so just to reiterate, I want to make sure we all know it's feedback at mackeykev.com. And that meetup was awesome. Thank you to everybody that came. It was so such a great group. We had some nice conversations happening, which really that's that's the point, right? We all just sort of hung out and it was great, really, really. But we got to do more about that, more about that. We got to do more of those. So yeah, thank you to really I want to a big shout out to Brian Monroe, who is often in our chat room. And and he was the catalyst to making this all happened. It was that were it not for him sort of nudging me along. Yeah, yeah, it just wouldn't happen. So thank you, Brian, and everyone who came. It was really, really awesome. It was it was great to get chat with each of you and all of you. So yeah, cool. You know, we're kind of talking about the future of iTunes and that sort of thing. So Brian's question, a different Brian, not Brian from the chat room, but but Brian from from email asks, what happens to iTunes running on older versions of Mac OS? How long will iTunes continue to exist outside of Catalina? And that's a good question. You know, my guess is that nothing is going to happen to iTunes. iTunes will not be end of life in older versions of Mac OS. So Mojave and prior, I think it's just Catalina and forward will have not iTunes, but instead will have, you know, what Apple is saying, the three different apps. I think it's more that we just added books to the list. And so it's, you know, music, podcasts, TV, right? That's what Apple says they're breaking iTunes into. Then they're also breaking out functionality into the finder for syncing and that sort of thing. And then books, that's already been done. So iTunes has been being disintermingled for quite some time and now starting with Catalina and going forward. I think that's where that's where iTunes will be no longer. But while older versions of Mac OS are still supported by Apple, which I believe is usually two back, then I think iTunes will be will be there. If there have been some questions related to this about prepping iTunes libraries and how that's going to work, I have not done enough testing with all of this to really to really know for certain, but I am fairly certain that you will not be sharing an iTunes library between a music app on Catalina and the iTunes app on Mojave, say, for example. So there are some folks that have, again, without the support of Apple sort of put their iTunes library on a shared place and making sure they don't, you know, run iTunes at the same time on on the same computer or on two different computers. You can run iTunes on one computer and point it at that library and then quit iTunes and then run it on another computer and point it at that library so you can have just one library that you use commonly between multiple Macs. I would I would not expect to be able to do that in any way with with Catalina and and prior. So we will we will get there. We'll figure out exactly how far you can go down that path. But if you are doing that, I would, you know, caution you to not plan to do that any more once once Catalina comes out. So there is an Apple insider piece that Brian Monroe and I believe Brian Monroe in the chat room pointed to that talks about all of this, at least as far as some of us know, you know, right now. But but there will be more to learn. So, yeah, well, I'm sure the migration will be seamless. I think it will be for most of us, I believe that's right. Yeah, kind of like with photos, you know, it just pulls in the old stuff. And yeah, yeah, well, it will do even easier than that, right? Because it's not baked inside some package or whatever. It's just files and an iTunes library file. Yeah, I still think it was clever the whole, you know, when you move the photos that it created a kind of a mirror and didn't take up any extra space. Oh, yeah, with the Hartlings and stuff. That's right. Yep. Yeah. So hopefully I'll do that because I think some people have big libraries and don't want to double it. Well, I yeah, I agree. Yeah, copying it in. But but it's not like with photos and I photo, you could actually run them in parallel on the same operating system. When you move to Catalina, you can no longer run iTunes. So I don't think there's even a need to have an iTunes library and a music library. I think it will just be split out. But the nice part is it's just stored in folders. So they just need to move those the contents without it. They're just files, right? So I think, yeah, I don't think we will need to have the iTunes library still there. I think it just gets moved into different folders and you're done. Yeah, or I suppose I could get the beta, which I assume is up there somewhere. It is. Yeah, I am down to the beta. I was going to install it on my laptop last week, but but ran out of time while I was at Dub Dub, but but I will I will I will do that this week. And and that way we can, you know, we can talk about it. You should put it on one of your machines, too, or at least on a, you know, on a like external drive clone. Yeah, clone one of your drives and and and, you know, put it on there just so just so we can have some like experience for for questions like this to help people, you know, pave their way and think about how they want to how they want to get there. So cool. All right, one this one last question sort of takes a left turn a little bit, but that's OK. Listener John asks, he says, I wanted to get your thoughts on how our home networks and the various smart assistants handle our information and data. He says, I'm a bit of a privacy wonk, so I like HomeKit over Alexa and Google at Al. Sorry, I was reading and forgot to parse a lady and my apologies. What really sparked my question was the most recent episode of Brian Chaffin's Apple context machine, where John Keat went on a little tangent about mesh systems like Euro, et cetera, a lady and privacy. My primary question is what happens with my data within my system? And my secondary question is, is HomeKit really helpful in protecting my data? And that I'm going to I'm going to really focus on the way he asked that question. Is HomeKit really helpful in protecting my data? So we'll get there. He says, I'll start with my setup. So he's a he's on Comcast Xfinity. He's got Docsis 3.1 and he's using Amplify HD from Unify from Ubiquiti, rather, as his mesh system. He says, I have a variety of IoT devices around 30 and all. Philips Hue, light strips with a bridge, I devices, outlets and switches, an ecobee for thermostat. All of the devices I have are HomeKit compatible, except for Kuna outdoor lights and cameras and nest fire detectors, nest protect. He says any other connected devices, laptops, et cetera, are all Apple Mac devices. So question number one, how does HomeKit protect my data and my information? Number two, even though the data transmitted between my devices on the HomeKit platform is shielded from the outside world, many of those devices still have hooks to their respective companies, i.e. my Hue lights are still sending information back to Philips. My ecobee is sending info back to ecobee, et cetera. Does this defeat the purpose of having a HomeKit enabled devices? And number three, along those lines, if I log the devices out of those accounts, does the information from them still flow out of the network to those companies? He says neither my router, Amplify HD, nor my modem are HomeKit quote compatible and I don't use a VPN. Again, does this defeat the purpose of using HomeKit? And number five, how do the other assistant platforms, the A-Lady, Google, et cetera, impact the whole scheme? He says, I suspect that when someone is using something like Amazon's A-Lady data is transmitted to both the product company and Amazon, is that correct? And I would also assume that the data housed in either or both of their clouds is not encrypted. OK, so let's let's let's sort of distill this down here. HomeKit on its own is. Protecting your data within your network. In fact, it's it's sort of crazy about the way it does it. Apple has backed off a little bit on this to make the encryption more realistic from a software standpoint. But it's still pretty strong encryption, but it's strong encryption between your iPhone and your HomeKit devices. And the idea is it's protecting the information that's on your iPhone. And that's really where Apple security from HomeKit comes from. That's the platform. That's that's the standpoint where they are focused is making sure that none of these smart home devices could possibly unintentionally leak information that's on your iPhone or allow your iPhone to be compromised by something and and and have information extracted from it. Because HomeKit is, as you pointed out, a local platform. All the communication for HomeKit is happening locally on your network. And so not only is that potentially good. And we'll get to why I said potentially from a security standpoint. But it also makes things much, much faster, right? Because you don't have to wait for this round trip to the cloud to do, you know, to have your lights turn on, for example. And that's great. But the risk there is it means that your iPhone is talking directly to your smart home devices. And so Apple wanted to build this security in there so that no one could hijack that particular stream. So this is it in. And so that's where HomeKit comes from, because there is a potential security risk if you're allowing your iPhone to be contacted by a device on your local network. You need to make sure it's the device you wanted to have it contacted by. Whereas something like, you know, Amazon's A-Lady or Google, those never talk directly to your devices, never talk directly to your iPhone. Your iPhone doesn't even have to be involved, but it could be. But it's all going out through the Amazon or Google's cloud to handle all that. So your personal data on your device is kept out of that mix. And again, that's where Apple's real focus for HomeKit security was and is, is on making sure that your data on your iPhone never gets compromised. And I think that kind of got lost out there in the messaging. And so we, and so you wind up with scenarios like John describes here, where it's like, well, what is HomeKit securing? HomeKit is securing the data on your iPhone. That's primary, prime directive number one. There are, again, some great sort of ripple effects from this. And one of them being that it's all your things are talking locally. And that's great, you know, because you get faster access to it. Assuming your devices are HomeKit compatible, which is, you know, sort of the assumption here. It is not HomeKit is not built to protect anything else. And specifically, it is not yet built to ensure that data on your smart home devices remains private. Yes, when they talk over HomeKit, they are using that security. But as you pointed out, your Philips Q bulbs and your Ecobee and probably everything else that you have can be linked right up with, you know, Amazon's Alexa or the personal, you know, the clouds of the companies that created them. In fact, that's exactly how you link with something like Alexa. Alexa. Oh, crap. Sorry. I keep saying it because I'm not thinking here. A lady talks to the clouds of your devices. So the A lady doesn't talk to your Ecobee thermostat. Your Ecobee thermostat talks to its cloud, so the Ecobee cloud. And the A lady talks to the Amazon cloud and the Amazon cloud talks to the Ecobee cloud, and that's how that link is made. So even though the two devices, you know, your your Amazon, you know, Echo device or whatever is in your home and your Ecobee thermostats in your home, they don't talk to each other. They each talk to their respective clouds and their respective clouds talk to each other. And just because a device is HomeKit compatible doesn't mean that it that it can't also talk to other things. In fact, I haven't seen many, if any devices that are only HomeKit because let's face it, more people use the Amazon A lady and the Google Assistant, then they do HomeKit and device manufacturers want to sell to as many people as make sense. So yeah. So, you know, the data stored on all those clouds, I think it is safe to assume that it's all encrypted. It's encrypted with the keys of, you know, like Ecobee or or, you know, Amazon in those cases, but I think it's encrypted in transit. It's encrypted at rest. I wouldn't worry about that. The question is, what does a HomeKit enabled router do? And I've got some questions into Apple. I don't have all the answers yet. So I don't even want to go too far. But the the initial speculation is that they will stop the transmission of data to the outside world from any device that is registered locally with HomeKit. But the question is, well, what is the implication of that and how do we work around it? Because if, for example, your Ecobee thermostat is, you know, connected to your HomeKit network and your HomeKit enabled router, whatever that is, says, aha, that thermostat, that device, that IP address is talking to HomeKit. So I'm going to block its access to the outside world because we don't need it. That would then mean, presumably, that it couldn't talk to Ecobee's cloud and it couldn't get firmware updates from Ecobee's cloud. And if you launched the Ecobee app, it wouldn't be able to talk to your thermostat because your Ecobee app doesn't talk locally to your thermostat. You'd both talk, you know, your iPhone app and the thermostat talk to Ecobee's cloud and down comes the data. So I'm not exactly sure how that's all going to work in a way that's still convenient for the user. So so I yeah. And in Brian and Rowan, the chat room is saying he doesn't think that's how it's going to work, which it could very well be, right? Like I said, that's the initial speculation on it. But it like that's a very interesting scenario. If in fact it's built to do that. He seems to think it's only talking about HomeKit secure video with HomeKit routers. So if that's the case, which it may very well be, then. There's no additional security to anything other than secure video. So. So any thoughts on that, John? No, I'm not using the I'm not doing the HomeKit thing. So I wouldn't know about. I mean, I'm flipping through an article here and I'm just assuming that. All this stuff is secure. I mean, it's secure. I mean, it's secure. The data sent to and from, say, Amazon for our lady stuff is sent securely like that. We know like you and I have done those tests and looked with like Debuki and seen. OK, this is, you know, it's it's, you know, encrypted traffic. That's great. And I think it's safe to assume that it's also encrypted on the at rest on their servers, any data that's, you know, that's living there. But, you know, it's only as secure as you make it with your passwords and things like that, but it is right. I mean, it is stored in the in the cloud. So yeah. So yeah, it's yeah. And everybody's got their privacy policies or documents and you can read over that. I mean, I just got one here. You know, I was just looking over this. It's a. Using the HomeKit accessory protocol, blah, blah, blah. Somewhere they say, hey, is it secure? And it's like. So like, yeah, what security features does. HomeKit use and they're like all sessions are encrypted and mutually authenticated. It's like, yeah, that's that's kind of what I figured. That's what it was kind of like you said, you know, with all the other stuff. Now, I suppose they could be unethical in mine, your data for, you know. I don't know that they could. Well, they could, you know, there is no HomeKit cloud, at least not yet. Right. There might be with the secure video thing, you know, part of iCloud might be turned into that, but there is no HomeKit cloud, right? So all of your HomeKit activity happens, it's private cloud. It either happens direct with your iOS device or it goes through. Like if you want to do HomeKit stuff while you're not at home, you have to have some something acting as a HomeKit hub. And that can be an Apple TV, the HomePod, or you can actually configure an iPad to be your HomeKit hub. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah. So but it's it's interesting, right? Like this is this is something we need to pay attention to as this evolves because right now there are a lot of people that think because they're using HomeKit, their data from all of their Internet of Things devices is secure. And that's simply not the case. It's just your HomeKit communication that said lots of router manufacturers. Forget about this HomeKit enabled router thing for for for right now. Lots of router manufacturers have put in intrusion protection and other things that filter against malicious activity. So they look at not just inbound activity, but also outbound activity. And if you one of your devices is trying to connect to something like, you know, some server that is known in a database to be a bad thing, they can block those things, right? Iro does it with their their Iro plus protection. The Deco stuff has their own protection. Well, it's not their own. I think it's Trend Micro's protection built in. But but it, you know, it works works really well. And and you can turn on, you know, again, it's got an intrusion prevention system. But it's also got a malicious content filter. And it looks to see, you know, as one of your devices been been compromised and is trying to send data out to something that, you know, by all rights is not where your data should be going. That it it can be blocked at the router level, which is the right place to block these things. So a lot of this stuff is protecting you already with, you know, if you've got the right router in place and and, you know, the Synology router that we recommend all the time has exactly this kind of thing built into it, lots of them do. So it's it's worth making sure that your router A has that and B is turned on. That doesn't stop Ecobee's device from speaking to Ecobee's cloud, nor nor should I do, I think it should. But but it does stop it from talking to, you know, some some hacker in Russia's cloud or whatever. Right. So it's it's a it's a good thing. But yeah, we need to we need to pay attention to what this HomeKit enabled router thing is, because that'll be interesting as as it as it evolves. So thanks for the question, John. Good stuff. Um, I have some tips to share from traveling here, John. But first, I want to take a minute and talk about our our next two sponsors. If that works, you know, for you, my friend, awesome, awesome. All right, cool. The first sponsor that I want to talk about is Linode at Linode.com slash MGG. That's L I N O D E dot com slash MGG. Linode is your server in the cloud, and they make things super easy and super affordable plans range just starting at five dollar a month, what they call nanodes in the cloud, uh, totally, you know, high power, dedicated CPU plans. And the cool part is you can just increase as your needs increase. So you can start with this five dollar a month nano thing. And as you need more either processing power or storage or Ram or whatever, you just sort of ratchet it up and it works really well. Like I've been running a VPN on my five dollar a month nanode. And here's the thing, you know, if you visit Linode.com L I N O D E dot com slash MGG and use promo code MGG two zero one nine. You get a twenty dollar credit. So that's four months worth of a nanode. Uh, and that might be the nanode might be enough to do what you want to do. So you've got four months to play on Linode just using coupon code promo code, they call it MGG two zero one nine. So make sure you check that out. And really, if it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. Most Linux Linux distributions are available out of the box. But of course you can upload your own custom images. If you've got something already that you kind of want to repurpose in the cloud, boom, they've got it right there. Plus they've got a huge library of what they call quick install options from applications like WordPress to games like Counter Strike Go and Minecraft. And of course the VPN stuff that I set up took me all of about three minutes because they already had the quick install option ready to go. I just clicked. I want this WireGuard VPN and boom, I was up and running. I didn't have to, you know, build it myself, although I could have if I wanted to, which is what makes it fun. So you've got to check this out. They've got a new data center in Toronto, Canada, that deals with all of that in country data protection requirements, as well as taking advantage of all of Linode's technology and tools. Everything there is an SSD server, which means even on the lowest priced nanode, you are on an SSD. So, you know, drive speed is just going to be smoking along. And it really is like I've experienced no lags of anything like that. Really, really great stuff. So go check it out. As I said, linode.com, L-I-N-O-D-E dot com slash M-G-G. Use promo code M-G-G two zero one nine and and then you get your twenty dollar credit and you can use it, you know, however you like, which is really, really fun. And our thanks to Linode for sponsoring the episode. Our second sponsor to talk about right now is BB Edit from Bare Bones. Man, you know, if there's one app that's always running on my Mac, it is BB Edit from Bare Bones. I use it for all kinds of things. I use it to manage our show notes. I use it to count the words in documents. I use it to to compare two documents. And then, of course, I use it for programming because it's right there and it knows what you're doing and sort of formats things very subtly, but in a way that makes it easy to see. They've just released BB Edit 12.6.3 as a maintenance update. They constantly keep this thing up to date. And BB Edit is now back in the Mac App Store with subscriptions available, which is their new App Store only model. So you do subscriptions in the App Store or you do, you know, buy it once pricing if you want to buy directly from Bare Bones.com. You can go either way while you're at Bare Bones.com. You could go to merch.barebones.com and buy lots of cool merch, including you can get one of those Rebus t-shirts like John and I have. So you got to check it all out. Visit Bare Bones.com. Download your copy of BB Edit, which you can download for free and try all the features for 30 days. And then even after 30 days, you can use quite a bit of the features for the rest of time. So go check that out. Bare Bones.com. And of course, our thanks to Bare Bones for sponsoring this episode. All right. So, John, I will come as a great surprise to you that I massively overengineered a potential solution that I didn't even need for last week while I was at WWDC. Does this come as a great surprise to you? Keep going. OK. So I knew that I was going to need to cover the keynote. I was going to be in the room with the keynote. Usually there's Wi-Fi there, but not always. And I didn't want to rely on that, right? Because I wanted to be able to take pictures and have them be part of our live coverage, right? Which, you know, it's just what we do. And so I thought, well, you know, it would be great if I could tether to my phone. But my current AT&T plan does not include tethering. And my current AT&T plan is also not available to anyone. So if I were to move away from my current AT&T plan, it's this unlimited, I don't know. I'll call it the unlimited budget plan. That's not the name for it. Unlimited select, maybe something that's not available anymore. But it's a it's a decently priced plan that gives me unlimited, but does not include it does not include tethering. So I was like, well, you know, I don't want to move my plan because then it'll cost me a fortune forever. You know, it'll cost me like an extra 40 bucks a month or something with the way the family plan works. And I thought, wait a minute. We just talked about dual SIM stuff on the show. And my iPhone 10R is dual SIM compatible. And because I listened to that episode, I installed all of those apps. I think it was Mac ikeb 750 something. I'll put a link in the show notes to this. But, you know, so we we talked about all these and I had all these apps for these providers that support dual SIM. So I took a look and figured out who was the least expensive for a US based data only plan. And it was gig sky. And so I bought actually bought way more data than I needed. I bought five gigs of data for 50 bucks. I could have bought, I think, you know, two or three gigs for like 30 or something like that. But I was like, yeah, you know what, I'll just buy the five gigs. It's fine. And I bought the five gigs of data and now even still now because I bought it's good for 30 days. So now on my phone, I have two cellular plans listed. I have my primary one, which is my AT&T one. And then I have this gig sky plan. And the cool part is I can set my default voice line independently of my cellular data provider. So before I got to WBC, I just left them both on my primary AT&T plan when I got there and it was like, OK, now I want to start, you know, being ready to use this gig sky data. I switched my cellular provider to gig sky. And the cool part was as soon as I did that, the option for personal hotspot became alive because while AT&T doesn't my AT&T plan doesn't allow personal hotspot, my gig sky plan does. And so I was able to just have that right there. I could turn it on and I could use it from my, you know, from my laptop or whatever I wanted to use it from. Now, as it turned out, of course, I didn't need it at all. I was in, you know, the Wi-Fi at the keynote was it was actually quite spectacular and they did a great job. But I had it if I needed it. And and it was, you know, it worked pretty cool. And I've got I've still got the two networks running on my phone. I think I've still got, I don't know, whatever, probably another 15 days or something. I signed up a few days before I left because I didn't want to have to do it like in the keynote. I wanted it to be all done. And, you know, it's it works great. It is pretty pretty impressive, actually. So and super, super easy to to make happen. And really nice that I could leave my voice calls on, you know, my primary network, my AT&T network, while switching just my data, which that was pretty cool. So I don't know. So is did I massively over engineer something, John? Well, you got the job done. I did get the job done. It's true. That's true. Yeah. So, you know, there you go. There you go. I also on my laptop, I put. An app called Tripmode, which is available at tripmode.ch. It's also part of set app. If you are a set app user. And what Tripmode lets you do is very easily tell it, hey, when I'm connected to that Wi-Fi network, you can do it manually too. But when I'm connected to that Wi-Fi network, only allow these apps to send data. So just like you can do on your phone when you're, you know, for cellular data, you can per network, actually, I can do this for Giggs guy or AT&T. But you you can say, don't allow these apps to to use, you know, the cellular data on your Mac, you say, don't allow these apps to use the Wi-Fi when I'm on this particular Wi-Fi network. So it it kept things like, you know, my photos from from syncing to iCloud and Dropbox and all of that. I just was able to to just block those out and make life really easy for myself so that I wasn't, you know, using my data. And in fact, even on the WWDC Wi-Fi, I still turn that Tripmode on and filtered out a bunch of stuff so that I wasn't, you know, using more Wi-Fi than I needed to at that moment so that I could have a, you know, a faster connection potentially, which which also worked really, really well. So yeah, Tripmode and Personal Hotspot together are quite blissful, I would say. So regardless of where you are, if you're running a Personal Hotspot, I would I would very much encourage you to check out Tripmode because that's it's awesome. So there you go. Thoughts on that, John? No. OK. We have some cool stuff found to go through here. And so it feels like we're already in cool stuff found territory. So so I'm going to I'm going to jump to that unless you have anything you want to add. Go, go. Chuck says, in response to Chris's geek challenge about a camera that automatically uploads to the cloud. He says, I also inspect homes, but I use my iPhone using an app called Upload Cam by Bitwise Software. Of course, the link will be in the show notes. It's essentially a camera app that allows me to set a Google Drive or a Dropbox folder to automatically upload photos to. The best feature is you can choose to have the photos you take with the app skip your camera roll. So that keeps my home inspection photos out of my family photos. So very, very cool solution there. I like that idea. Upload Cam. So thanks, Chuck. Good stuff. Anything to add there, John, before we move on? No. OK, I like it. I do, too. In a similar to solve the same problem a different way, Allison from No Silicast says. I heard the challenge about a way to use a real camera. And. As John mentioned, many cameras have Wi-Fi and there are cards like the Mi-Fi. I don't think that's what she meant, right? Or is that one of the cards? Maybe that is. I think of Mi-Fi as the one of the newer ones. Got it. OK, so that is right. OK, I think that's the Toshiba one. Got it. OK, cool. Well, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. So she says many cameras have Wi-Fi and there are cards like Mi-Fi if your camera doesn't have Wi-Fi. She says, I have a fair amount of experience using Wi-Fi on real cameras with iOS. There's one insurmountable obstacle and it's the speed of the cards themselves. It's really slow to transmit photos from a memory card to another device over Wi-Fi. If the guy wants to do it anyway, the answer isn't to have them automatically transmitted because it's too slow. The better answer is to use an app that allows the user to selectively choose which images to upload. I use a great app called Cascable, C-A-C-A-C-A-S-C-A-B-L-E that lets you see the images on the card in fairly large size on iOS. Then you can choose just the jewels to upload. But if he needs a lot of images, he's way better off using a card reader into an iPad. And by the way, the Files app in iOS 13. Sorry, the Files app in iPad OS 13 will let you plug a an SD card in and see the data right there. We're not quite sure if it works on iPhone with iOS. Although I think somebody was saying last week that it did, but you know that this is the beta, so these features might come and go real fast. So thank you for that, Allison. That's great. Anything to add there, John? Now, I was wrong there. Now, that's not the Toshiba card. I don't know what she was thinking over the Wi-Fi. I think she was thinking Wi-Fi. Right. But a couple of shows ago, I find an article on the other. They're like three vendors. Yeah, yeah. Toshiba makes one. Transcend makes one. And then there was a third one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I will I think that was episode 763, where we talked about that. So I will put a link to that in the show notes, I think, if I can. And if I can't do it right now, then I was. Yeah, it was our backup your sinks episode. So there you go. All right. So a link to that in the show notes for anybody that wants to go back and look at those links, too. And a reminder, you know, the show notes can be emailed right to you if you would like. It's a super handy way to make sure you don't miss anything. I had a lot of people at WBC last week tell me, you know, yeah, I always think when I'm listening, hey, I want to go back to MacGicab.com and read the show notes so that I can remember to click on those links and check those things out. And then they just forget about it entirely and never wind up going back and missing out on a lot of these great things. And that's why they tell me they love the new email because you don't have to remember to go check. You just get it in your inbox and it's everything right there. So make sure to go to Mac. I know this is like sort of a meta thing. But if you go, if you can remember once to go to MacGicab.com, you can sign up for the newsletter and all future episodes. The show notes from them will arrive in your inbox. Basically at 8 a.m. the morning 8 a.m. Eastern in the morning after the episode has been released. So so there you go. You can just have them all right there. It's it's great stuff. And I will say this, you know, we always tell you with our sponsors. It is our job to wet your appetite enough that you want to go learn a little bit more from our sponsors. And beyond that, whether you purchase or not is between you and them. And so the the email helps you, right? Because it's also got the links to all of our sponsors right there. Then you can click on those. And that also really helps us in that, you know, you're learning about stuff. And if it's something that therefore is of value to you, that's great. But the sponsors see that we've sent you there and they like that, that we don't get paid for clicks or anything. But they do look to see how many people we're, you know, directing to them. And that's a good thing. So if you're so inclined, we'd appreciate you checking that out, too. That truly helps us. And that which helps us in theory helps us help you because here we are. It's part of the deal. All right, continuing on. Yes, John. All righty. Listener Jason has a tip for us. A book called Unix for the beginning mage and it's downloadable for free. He says this book's a great intro to Unix terminal using a creative little story to explain commands. He says, in my opinion, it does a great job of providing enough info to be helpful, but not so much as to lose new users. Thank you for this, Jason. That's great stuff. Yeah, Unix for the beginning mage. So it's a PDF book. You can go download it and enjoy it however you like to enjoy your PDFs. So thanks for that, man. Very good stuff. Anything on that before we move on to a different Jason, John? Can. No, OK, everybody should know Unix. Yeah, it's not. Well, sure, it's a handy thing to know, especially being that we're Mac users and there's the terminal. Another Jason says he shares with us DOS dudes fix and I use fixed with air quotes here for the 2011 MacBook Pro GPU. So there is a problem with and there was a recall on the 2011 MacBook Pros because their discrete GPU would flake out and fail. And there was a class action lawsuit and all this stuff. And the problem is once it does flake out and fail, you can't even boot your Mac to use the internal GPU. There is a way around this and it's not necessarily for the faint of heart, but it is out there. And so I will put this in the in the notes. It does involve, I believe it involves opening things up. But also installing some software to sort of route around it. So we will put a link to this in the show notes. For those of you, if anybody that's having that problem, it does allow you to, you know, get some more life out of these machines, even though you can't use the the discrete GPU in there, you can use the built-in one, which isn't so bad. So it's at least something. So thanks for that, Jason. Good stuff. Anything on that, my friend? Oh, I've been through. I was through that with a past machine. Yeah. And for Apple care, there happened to be a recall. And they're like, here's a new motherboard. I'm like, thanks. Right. But they attributed it to the GPU. Interesting. Interesting. Or they identified that as a problem and they're like, oh, well, your GPU is flaky. So I might as well give you another motherboard. Sure. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, cool. Juan writes in and says, I discovered this device called the ISY994 Home Automation Controller. And I says I discovered it a few years back and fell in love with its programmability and almost unlimited use. If you have the patience to learn how it works and to tinker around, you will find it to be one of the best ways of controlling almost all of your IoT devices. It supports Z-Wave Plus, Insteon, X10, ZigBee Pro, Amazon Echo, Google Home, IFTTT, et cetera, just to name a few. They are constantly adding new features. They just added the ability to check on your Tesla. It doesn't rely on the cloud. And is that me? I think that's you, right, John? You having a alarm? Yeah. Okay, nice. Mute those phones. You know, I'm gonna stop right here in the middle because we're already interrupted. I use the MacGeekGab app as my reminder to myself to make sure I'm muted before the show. How do I use the MacGeekGab app to do this? Well, before we livestream every episode, we send a notification out to the MacGeekGab app that lets everyone know. And of course, I have it installed, and so I get that. And if I hear the sound, it reminds me, aha, turn it off. And for those of you that didn't know, yeah, we've got a MacGeekGab app. It is currently just an iOS app, but Corey was at the meetup and we all got to talking. He and Brian Monroe actually got to talking quite a bit about some features for the app and that sort of thing. And this might be a good opportunity for a catalyst, a project catalyst experiment. So you never know if that app might come to the Mac, but it is freely available. Go ahead, download it from the iOS app store. We will put that in the show notes because it's what we do. So yeah, make sure you go download the MacGeekGab app. All right, so back to this ISY994 thing. Juan says that they just added the ability to check in on your Tesla and it doesn't rely on the cloud. And he says, and customer support is very good. He says, the only negative I have to say is their reliance on third-party iOS apps, which are not necessarily very pretty, but are perfectly functional. So it's from UniversalDash, wow, man, easy for you to say. UniversalDashDevices.com, we have a link in the show notes in case I munched describing it too much, so. Pretty cool, huh, John? Looks that way. It does, I know, I agree. All right, Scott has a question. I think we can get to it, where are we on time? Well, it clocks way over there now that I'm looking this other direction. Yeah, it's at 112, okay. Scott says, I have my new Mac MIDI 2018 sitting in a box. I'm waiting for my RAM and external SSD to arrive from other world computing. Once I have all this, I will be ready to move all my files and such from my 24-inch 2009 iMac to the new Mini. For a monitor, I have a Dell 27-inch 4K UHD in the box as well. My iMac has an internal one terabyte SSD that I put in a few years ago. My new Mini has 256 gigs of internal storage and I will be putting an external one terabyte USB-C SSD on there as well. My goal is that my OS and apps will be on the internal drive and my home folder, et cetera, will be on the SSD. This should be faster than the internal SSD on the iMac because the SATA bus on the iMac was pretty slow by today's standards. My question, you knew it was coming, says Scott, what do you think is the best way to move the data? I wasn't sure if I can define where the home folder should be during the setup on the new Mini. If migration assistant can split that up, if it would be easy, do you know if it will do this? Number two, if I cannot and you cannot, then the 256 gig internal drive is too small for my home folder. So I was thinking maybe it makes sense to transition the iMac to put the home folder on a different external before the migration this way. I can then, I just have the home folder there after setup is done. Or I could set up the Mini fresh and not transfer anything, then manually move all the files from a clone of the iMac drive. I'm concerned that this will miss some stuff in the long run. And then he asks another question, which we'll get to, I'll circle back to at the end, which is about going from Thunderbolt to FireWire 800. So we'll talk about that. But, so my first question for Scott is and anybody in this scenario is why is your home folder too big for that 256 gig internal drive? If it is related to photos and or music, then that's an easy solution. Move those to the external drive first, just your photos library and or your music library. Move those to the external drive first, map them in the supported way inside the photos and iTunes apps and then use migration assistant to do the rest. Because that way, once it's there, you're fine. I am, and if it's other stuff, is it relocatable in an easy way? Like, do you have a folder full of say, movie files that you've created from something and those are like, what's taking up your space? And I ask these questions because while it is totally feasible to have your home folder not on your boot drive, it's not the Apple recommended way. It is, I'll call it softly supported by Apple, but it really is the kind of thing that will probably cause you some amount of headache. I don't wanna say it's gonna cause data loss or anything like that because you're, if you're thinking about this, you're probably fairly technically inclined anyway. So you'll probably be okay from that standpoint, but from a headache standpoint, I think, you know, but there you go. You don't wanna get caught like the, even the fire department there agrees, right, John? So, you know, for that reason, I'm really partial to keeping the home folder on the boot drive where possible, but not at the expense of buying a larger SSD from Apple, right? So there's a limit to my madness, John, but so I would really look at why your home folder's too big and just see if there are things that you could segment out while leaving the home folder as a home folder intact. What do you think about that, John? Yeah, I mean, I think you gotta, the question is why and the good news is that migration assistant does have a level of granularity so you don't have to bring everything over. That's true. Oh, right. That's right. And the other thing I recall is that, yeah, like you said the thing is that, I remember this, there's something buried in your account set up where you can point to a different place for the home folder, as you mentioned. I wouldn't do that. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, I mean, you know, you can, again, you can do it. I think it's you go in and into system preferences, go to your user account, right click on your user account and choose advanced options. And that's where you can choose your home directory, but it's not that simple. There is more to be done. You need to move things first. You need to set permissions first. Then you need to change where your home directory is. Actually, I think it's better to create a second user so that you're not changing the home directory of an existing logged in user. Again, it's doable. Just the question is why? And hopefully you can route around that. There's a couple of thoughts here in the chat room. KiwiGram says, I think the problem is when apps assume that your home folder is on the boot drive, less of an issue these days. He says, yeah, I agree with that, but also what happens if your external drive, doesn't mount quickly enough at startup, right? Now your Mac is trying to log into an account that the home folder doesn't exist. I mean, again, it just creates this potential C of problems that otherwise isn't there. So, and yeah, I like your point, John, about if you can't do it this way, then migration assistant will let you be somewhat granular about it. I totally forgot about that with migration assistant. That's a good thing. The other option, you know, if you're gonna have a one terabyte external drive, that's probably gonna be fast enough to boot from without you really noticing that you're booting from not the internal drive. You could just migrate, you could just install Mojave on that and let that be your boot drive. It would be better, I think, from a space utilization standpoint, if you could do what you would like to do and keep the OS, your apps and the shell of your home folder on the internal drive, that's probably a good use of that storage and then you've got that one terabyte for whatever else you wanna do. So, yeah, I really encourage you to think about that why, though. That's the question. I would love to hear from other folks out there if you've experienced, if you've run into this and sort of taken a different path that would be good to do. Any more thoughts on that, John? Nope. Okay, so Scott also asked how to, he asked, do either of you know of a Thunderbolt 3, so over USB-C, Thunderbolt 3 to FireWire 800 dongle. He says, I have a few chained external hard drives using FireWire 800 on the iMac and I was hoping to just move them to the new iMac as is, but I can connect them via USB if I must. So, to my knowledge, it still doesn't exist. There is no Thunderbolt 3 to FireWire 800 dongle, but there is a way to go from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 and then you can use Apple's Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter to get from Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800. And I'm actually doing that on this computer, believe it or not, from Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800 just to split out my FireWire stuff, even though this computer has FireWire, but you can get from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 in a variety of ways. Most, many, I don't want to say most, many of the Thunderbolt 3 docks out there, including the one from OWC. I know you've been buying other stuff from there, so. But their Thunderbolt 3 dock has a Thunderbolt 2 port on it. So, so you can get yourself to that and then, you know, jump to FireWire 800 from Thunderbolt 2. But to my knowledge, that's the only way to do that. I don't think there's any one-stop shop for example. I am guessing you haven't looked into this, but maybe you have since you're thinking about upgrading and all that stuff. Not really. Okay, all right. Okay, good stuff. Let me put that link in there. So we've got that, good. Where are we on time here? Do we have time to do Brett's? I think so. Well, let's try it here. Brett says, thanks to WWDC. It looks like it's time for a new Mac in the near future since my 2010 Mac Pro will no longer run the latest and greatest OS, as mentioned earlier in the episode. So while I'm not in a rush to go out and get one, I was thinking about getting a Mac Mini and using the Thunderbolts to fill in some missing parts. I'd love one of the new CheeseGrader Mac Pros, but I can't justify spending that much since my workload has changed. I'm looking at going from a two quad-core Xeon Mac Pro with 40 gigs of RAM and seven terabytes of storage and upgraded Radeon Sapphire card to a Mac Mini with an i7, a six-core, the six-core i7, 32 gigs of RAM and the 512 gig SSD built in. I'm looking at WWDC's Thunderbay Thunderbolt 4 storage case to move some of the drives on the Pro to the Mini so I don't kill the new Mini's SSD. The main OS drive is only 480 gigs with most libraries running on the other drive. I was also thinking about the OWC Helios setup to make up for the seemingly weak Intel graphics in the Mini. So that's the external GPU is that Helios. So I use the graphics mostly for games, some video work and some computer graphics work. Since I plan on using it for gaming, software dev, video dev, two to three virtual machines in parallel and maybe some graphics, is this new setup plan overkill or is this probably what I need to keep similar horsepower as I have? So I think this sounds like a good plan, but it is worth comparing pricing to an iMac simply because you're adding that graphics card via the eGPU. The iMac has a discrete graphics card built into it. It may or may not be enough for you, but you look at that just to make sure that price-wise you're actually taking the right path. You may already have a display and everything so you don't need to buy the display of the iMac and I get that, but it's worth just taking a step back for a second and sort of doing that math and making sure that the Mini is truly the right choice given all the stuff that you're gonna be adding to it. Otherwise, I think your plan with the Mini will work out fine, but it's good to be sure. But yeah, so this is your great example, Brett, of who the Mac Pro is not for, right? Who the new Mac Pro is not for and why that Mac Mini is a great option for a lot of people that previously were Mac Pro customers. That i7 and the Mac Mini really does fill a gap. That iMac fills a different gap. The iMac Pro fills yet a different gap and then there's way up at the top is the new Mac Pro that sort of covers those bases up there for people that really need the horsepower of say several computers all baked into one and that's really the right way to think of that new Mac Pro. Yeah, I think that's not a bad deal. What are you, any thoughts on that, John? Sounds like a decent upgrade. It does, yeah, yeah. I meant to launch Mac Tracker here. I mean, I've looked at it before, but you know, the i7, where is Mac Tracker? There it is. The i7 Mac Mini, I think clocks out on Mac Bench at 24,000 on the multi-core scores. And if you look at the, he has a 2010 Mac Pro, I believe he said, and that one clocks out, I believe, I can't, I don't know, which he says he's got the two quad-core Xeons. So I will assume that's the most powerful one. That clocks out at 17,000 on the score there. So, you know, there's definitely a huge bump from 17 to 24, so that Mac Mini CPU is quite a bit faster than the Mac Pro that you're coming from. So there you go. Yeah, it's not bad, right? It's a good little upgrade, that, yeah, and then perhaps that's a nice way to frame all this is that, yeah, you know, that Mac Mini is really more capable than a lot of people give it credit for. So with the GPU accepted, right, that the built-in GPU may not be the right thing for everyone, but again, like Brett pointed out, you know, you've got that external GPU that can do whatever you want it to do. Yeah, what was the number you got? From? Benchmark number? The benchmark number on the Mac Mini, 24,000, oh, wow. I know. I'm looking at mine and mine comes in at like 6,000. It's crazy. No, like I said, we've got one of those i7 Mac Minis for Lisa to use at the house and it's the fastest Mac we have, but I mean, you know, far and away the fastest Mac we have, really cooking. Like I said, until the 2019 iMacs came out, I was convinced that that would be my next machine. I mean, my iMac in the office is a 2014, it's the first of the Retina 5K iMacs. And of course I got it with the, you know, the four gigahertz CPU, the fastest one, whatever it is, the Core i7. So it's a four-core with, what would you call it? The hyperthreading. And that clocks in at 14,000. So like, you know, and that, like I said, it's super fast. Lisa's machine totally blows it away. And it's noticeable, really is. And plus it's got that super fast SSD in it. You know, the Mac Mini, I mean, I think I was seeing what 2,000 megabytes or something a second right on that. I mean, even my MacBook Air does almost that reading from the SSD. It's just crazy. So yeah, it's good little, they've made some good machines, which is, you know, makes me happy. That's a good thing. I mean, I'm, and I'm also kind of happy, but also kind of sad that we're, you know, we're at the end of the show. I mean, I always feel good when we finish a good show. I feel like this one's been a good one, but I'm also sad because it's, you know, because it's over and we have to wait a week to do it again. But that's how it goes. You know what I'm saying? I hear you. My throat feels good though. I have a feeling there might be something to this turn to the left thing for me. So I mean, I mostly face straight, but you know, it's like a little to the left. Yeah. Talk to your chiropractor, maybe they can fix you. Well, this is not a skeletal thing. It's, it's the, it's the muscles on the right side of my face and throat, like that, that trigeminal nerve sort of affects from, you know, just above the eye to all the way down through the throat. It, that's what was paralyzed during, when I had Bell's Palsy for like three months and it, it recovered mostly, but it got to like 90%, I will say. And, and, and stop. So I mean, I have full functionality or whatever, but if I, if I, if you, if you see me in person, feel free to ask me to do this. It's totally fine. I'm not, it doesn't bother me. But I can, I can, if I smile, like as far as I can go on both sides, you can totally see that my right side doesn't go as far as my left. I learned through some physical therapy and stuff years ago to, to how to balance things out sort of, and it's fine. And like I said, I sort of relearned how to sing and all that stuff too. But I say relearned, I learned how to sing. I didn't really, I'd never learned before that. But, but yeah, the right side of my throat isn't quite the same. I will say this though, I went from like, it got to 90 and was totally happy. And then it was recommended to me a couple of years ago to try CBD and CBD resumed the healing process and probably got me, you know, from 90 to 95%. It really was like amazing what that stuff did for me. So I just, I share that. So there you go. Anything else? I like it when they share. Oh, well, that's what we do here. We share, man. All right, well, we talked about how to find us. We did not tell you if you are a premium listener first. Thank you. And secondly, of course, you get to email us at premium at MacGeekGab.com. Any of you are welcome to call us at 224-888-Geek, which John is. 4-3-3-5. And go download the MacGeekGab app. There's a lot, there's lots that you can do there. Like I said, you get the notifications. You also get, you can join the chat room, right? You can hear the lives. It's not that just that you get a notification, but entire functionality of the chat room and the stream is built right into the app. So you can listen, you can join along if you like with us. Of course, it also downloads the episodes and allows you to listen. You can bookmark things in the episodes, which is cool. If there's something you wanna come back to, you can email us from within the app. And if you do it while you're listening to an episode, it tags the email, not only with the episode number, but also the timestamp and the chapter. So when you say, hey, I've got this thing, like you don't have to preface it by saying, this is in response to Brett's question in show seven, nope, we already know. It's already right there in the email so that when we get it, you're good to go. And you don't even have to remember the email address. It's cool, it knows. So check that out. And there's more to the app too and more coming. But yeah, go check out the app. But we would love that. Go down on the app and then maybe we'll see in the chat room next week, which would be fun. I think next time is Monday afternoon, I wanna say the 17th because we've got, well, we've got Father's Day next Sunday, don't we, John? So there you go. Our thanks to CashFly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Our thanks to all of you. John, do you have anyone to thank on our way out the door here? All our listeners. Wow, there you go. Perfect. Our thanks to all our sponsors. As we mentioned in the episode, Eero at Eero.com, promo code MGG, Linode at Linode.com slash MGG, we're promo code MGG2019. Get you a $20 credit. Of course, BB Edit from Barebone Software. We also wanna thank our ongoing sponsors in the podcast marketplace, including Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast, Otherworld Computing at macsales.com. What is it, ring at ring.com slash MGG. They're not a current sponsor, but we sure love their stuff. There's others too. Lots coming. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for everything you do, all your questions and your tips and all that stuff. And because of that, as thanks, I would like to share with you the best advice that I can come up with to share. Really, it truly is the best advice for all scenarios. There's lots of different ways to get here. But if you follow this advice, you'll have a fulfilling life. And that is, don't get caught. Made up.