 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek at episode 757 for Monday, April 15th, 2019. Thanks, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek at the Show, where we take all your questions, all your tips, all your cool stuff found, we mix it with our tips, our cool stuff found. Sometimes we throw a rant in there, maybe a tangent, a fish shake, something, anything, whatever it takes, so that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Malwarebytes at malwarebytes.com slash Mac, we'll talk about why you want to go there in a little bit. But for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut, getting ready for tax day because we all love paying our taxes. This is John F. Brown. Well, actually, by the time people listen, it will either already be or have been tax day. So there you go. Yeah. You know, tax day is one of those things. It's like it's, of course, it's never enjoyable if you have to spend money. If you wind up getting a refund and it meant all you did was overspend money. But you know, we're fortunate if we're able to, if we have taxes to pay, it means we earn some money and that's not a bad thing. So Charmed Life, a big part of the Charmed Life is perspective, I think. So that's how I, that's how I get through my days. Let's see. Let's go to, we had a question on Twitter from listener Michael. Actually, you know, there's a lot to talk about today and we'll, we'll get into some of it. I guess the first thing I should mention is we're on a new mixer here. The Mackey Onyx 1220 Firewire mixer that we had since August of 2005 finally decided to fully die. It has been slowly dying for a little while. But the other day, and I knew this, and I, in fact, even said to someone who has one of those, I said, I might need to borrow your mixer if mine dies before I figure out what I want to replace it with. And I said, it's, it's giving me signs of Dave, you should replace me soon, otherwise you'll regret it. And on Thursday afternoon, Lisa was up here in the studio doing some work and she said, I don't think there's any sound. I can't get sound to come out of the speakers and it was like, yeah, I know exactly what's going on. So I got online. I found the Behringer, well, what's the model? I can't remember what the model, oh, it's the, the UFX 1204, which is essentially a drop in replacement for this Onyx 1220. It's a fully firewire mixer and I like firewire for audio better than USB because firewire is natively isochronous, which means that data is sent at regular time intervals and with real time audio. That's sort of an important thing USB is supposed to be able to be isochronous, but my experience is that it's not. So isochronous and not synchronous isochronous, I S O C H R O N O US. That's right. Yes. It's like synchronous. Oh, I don't know. I'm not sure what isochronous would be, but the word is isochronous when you're talking about technology. Right. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I mean, it's it sounds similar to isochronous. I don't know if isochronous is a word, let alone what it would depict or or describe. But yeah, so isochronous audio, right, is their isochronous connections mean that things are happening at a at a regular time interval and bandwidth is dedicated to that, which is which was, you know, one of the core components of firewire. That's why it's so great for was so great is so great for drives and things like that in USB is is just sort of like whoever yells the loudest gets some space and everybody else sort of has to wait and it's sort of a mess. I mean, USB works great for a lot of things. Just audio, one of them, even though that's what most of us wind up having to use for audio and it can be OK, but it like firewire spending anyway. So this it may well be the last firewire mixer I get because there's not many of them on the market. I'm very fortunate that Berenger decided to effectively clone what Mackey used to do. Mackey doesn't make one of these anymore. So you may notice it sounds different because, well, it's a drop in replacement functionally, of course, you know, it shows up zeroed out and I decided not to just try and copy the exact gain settings and EQ settings from the old one. I decided that's as good an opportunity as any to start from scratch. And so I think we're I like the sound we have. I'm course going to listen back to this episode and we'll make some tweaks and all of that. But hopefully it sounds all right. We always like to hear from you folks to feedback at mackeykeb.com is, you know, as good a place as any board. You have that board you have is great because I heard you crystal clear saying feedback at mackeykeb.com. See, so like nowadays, like our longstanding problem is solved. It's feedback at mackeykeb.com. Yeah, but it was weird. Like I think what died in this in this old one is the firewire card. It was an add on card. And anytime I sent. Audio that would hit like zero DB on the meters, like, you know, not not over driving it, but but hitting, you know, the like a loud enough signal. I could watch the meters start to like flicker in and out. But it was only if I sent it via firewire. If I like if I ran just, you know, raw audio through the board and did that, the board was totally fine. But with firewire audio, like I could I could literally watch it while we were doing the show and I could hear it too. It would like artificially compress in my ears. You folks weren't hearing it. Otherwise, you know, that that would have been a no go. But it was obvious that this thing was, you know, on its way out. So thankfully, I was able to make a split second decision on Thursday afternoon. It arrived Saturday. We're recording Sunday. All is good. So, yeah, let us know what you think. That'd be good. All right. Now we're good on that. We can go to Michael now, John. Yeah. OK, cool. Michael wrote us actually on Twitter at Matt Kekeb. He says a question for you guys. My neighbor has a 15 inch MacBook Pro 2016 and she has a 27 inch Apple cinema display that she wants to hook up to it, but needs some sort of adapter to do so that allows the power, the thunderbolt and the USB to all be connected. So I'm assuming it's the three way cinema display connector that has those three things you just described. There were a couple of different models that Apple called cinema display. But I think this is the right one. And I think all that's needed is mini display port. So that looks like a Thunderbolt two port, right? Well, better to say Thunderbolt two and Thunderbolt one used mini display port for Thunderbolt. But in this scenario, it is mini display port. So you that MacBook Pro that you described the 15 inch 2016 has two or maybe four Thunderbolt capable USB C ports, which means that you need a USB C to mini display port adapter. And they're available in a variety of formats, including something like, you know, the O W C Thunderbolt three dock has has one of those on there. And Dave Ginsberg in our chat room at mackekeb.com slash stream says the Thunderbolt two to Thunderbolt three adapter will also work. And I believe that comes from Apple, if I'm not mistaken. So, yeah, like this should be relatively doable. Really, the question is what other while you're doing this, are there any other capabilities that you would want? And does it make sense to justify the purchase of like, you know, the O W C Thunderbolt three dock or do you just need the adapter? And it is from Apple and I'll put a link to it in the show notes. So thanks, Dave Ginsberg thoughts on that, Mr. Braun. Yeah, I kind of got a Franken connector, at least on my Mac mini here. So one display I got plugged in HDMI. And then the other I have the mini display port to HDMI adapter. And then I have an HDMI to DVI adapter going to the other display. OK, because I don't think it has the HDMI on it. It's a very old screen, but it does have DVI, which is good enough for me. Any thoughts about what Mike's going through here? When the time comes, I'll have to wrestle with that as well. Yes. Yeah. But, you know, it's important to remember that Thunderbolt is is by design a very adaptable protocol, like nothing other than other interfaces are Thunderbolt native, right? It Thunderbolt is like PCI in, you know, if you have slots in your computer, it's you buy something that goes into this slot that adapts you to or add some functionality. So yeah, that that that should work just fine. So Dave says I have the O W C dock and I still need that adapter. You may be right about that. But I thought the O W C dock had a mini display port on the back of it. I am looking at the O W C Thunderbolt three dock or at least at their picture of it, because mine is downstairs. But but it says it's got a and I can see the picture of the mini display port right there on it. So that should work unless this display is actually transmitting something that is Thunderbolt data, in which case, Dave Ginsburg in the chat room is absolutely right. So so thank you for that, Dave. That's actually very helpful. So there you go. And this is actually a great highlight, right? Just because the port shape is the same doesn't mean that it's passing the data you're expecting. So I think Dave's right. You need that adapter. Thank you. This is what I love about our chat room. When we get something wrong, we don't have to. You don't have to live a week with the wrong information. So here you go. And you can find that at MacGab dot com slash stream. Thank you, Mr. Braun. All right, let's see. You know, I'm going to share a tip from listener Barber here because because why wouldn't we as soon as I find it here? Why can't I find Barber's tip? Oh, because I'm not sorted alphabetically. That's my problem. She says everyone may already know this, but I was not aware. No, Barbara, it wasn't just you. Thankfully, I had set up my card correctly in contacts as well as in series preferences. She says in January, I flew on a Delta plane from Charleston, South Carolina to San Antonio. As soon as I arrived where I was staying in New Bromfield, Texas, I realized that I had left my iPad Pro on the airplane. She said I tried everything I could to contact the San Antonio airport to talk to a person about my iPad. Well, I am here to tell you that this was not going to happen. All you can do is fill out a form. I was frantic while preparing to drive back to the airport. My iPhone rang and that moment I knew they had found my iPad. The only way they knew how to contact me was because the people in the lost and found office knew how to ask Siri who owned the iPad. They told me how they found out who was to contact and I was so thankful. Please know that I did not doubt that the iPad would be turned in. I just didn't want to be without it that particular night. She says I certainly didn't remember how I had set it up. So she found an OS 10 daily dot com article that describes it. And we'll of course put that in the show notes. She says, yeah, like what a cool thing. I had no idea that you could do that with Siri. Thankfully, Barbara had, you know, set this up for herself. But it's it involves setting up your my contact record in contacts, which is a good thing to do. And then in Siri and in the Siri settings, you can go down to my information and also do that with your your contact record. And and then you can ask Siri whose iPhone is this or whose iPad is this. And boom, it will show that. That's pretty cool. I like it. I like it. I like it. Yeah, I raised that. Yeah, mine. Yeah, my information. It says, you know, because it knows who you are. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right. Let's see. I put this in here. Yeah, OK. Now, let's talk about a couple of these things that are happening this week. There's there's two things that I think are relevant to Mackie Kebblister. So it wasn't just a bad week for technology in terms of, you know, my personal world and mixer here. It was a bad week in general. Dropbox, actually, they put this in place a month ago, but just started sending out the emails in the last couple of days. Dropbox now on their free plan has a three device limit, which means you can only install the Dropbox app on three devices per account if your account is in free mode. This is not going to be enough for a lot of people. If you have an iPad, a Mac and an iPhone, you're done. If you have an iPad, a Mac and an iPhone and another Mac, like say a laptop and a desktop or a home machine and a work machine, but you want to sync your Dropbox account to both of them, you can't do that anymore. Everything you currently have sync to Dropbox is grandfathered in. But when it comes time to, say, replace your iPhone, you can't use the slot for your iPhone for your new iPhone. You have to get down to only two devices. And then you can add your new iPhone back to Dropbox. This is not a good thing. And for a lot of us, it, you know, I mean, I think it's a hundred bucks a year that you would pay to to release this limit and also get up to I think a terabyte of storage right on Dropbox. So if it's in for some of us, it may well be worth spending that hundred bucks a year for a lot of people, though, it's not going to be. And and that's not going to be overly fun. So, you know, I would be being Synology users. John and I, I think, well, certainly for me, for my personal files, I sync everything with Synology Drive, which is private cloud, very much like hosting my own Dropbox-esque type of thing. But Dropbox is really handy for syncing with other people because it, you know, had become ubiquitous. Through their, you know, referral program early on and this free offering that was very compelling and all that. So everybody has Dropbox, and if you don't, it's very easy to get it. And then you can, you know, have a folder that's shared amongst multiple people. But with a three device limit, like it currently works OK for me. But within six months, I guarantee that that's going to fall off. So I'm I'm looking for alternatives. It seems like either Box.com or perhaps even more likely Microsoft's OneDrive. Box.com gives you 10 gigs free. OneDrive gives you five for sharing with other people. That's generally going to be enough. Somehow my Box.com account has 50 gigs free, which is sort of interesting. But I don't know. I can't remember how I got there. But yeah, with Box, I remember the last time I looked at it, they had some limitation on the on the free plan regarding, I think file sizes or something. Maybe they do. You're right. I think the maximum file size on drop sorry on Box.com is 250 megabytes. Yes. Yeah. And I was like, well, that seems awfully arbitrary. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I want to mention here and, you know, a few of us, including our friend, Dave, notice this. If you go, you may have. Old devices in your device list. So Dropbox keeps track of this. You may want to look at that just to clean things up. You may have. And I certainly did. And I think David did as well. I had tons of old devices and it also geocodes it. So it was like, yeah, you know, I got your iPhone 7 in Hophug, New York. The only reason I think they did that is because my ISP has a presence. Over in New York. Sure. But I had like probably 15 entry device entries. So so the way you get there, you may want to review it and clean it up. And I certainly did. I'm going to let I'm going to let you finish this path. But folks, don't clean it up yet. I have a caveat to add here, but go ahead. OK, well, I cleaned mine up. But the thing is, so through the web interface, if you click on your account and then you go to settings. And I think is it in security? It is. That's right. And then security and you're going to see a whole bunch of things. But on the bottom of that list, you're going to see devices. And it's going to show you all the devices that it is aware of. For that account. And and like I said, I had a whole bunch of. Old devices, which to me it didn't and also redundant entries, you know, like that were geocoded incorrectly. So I cleaned all of those up and everything seems to be still working. But please share your concern, my friend. Well, they're everything that you currently have in Dropbox on a free account is grandfathered. So having extra devices there is not currently an issue unless you need to add one. And then in order to add one, you have to get down to two or less in that list. So if you are going to add one and if you know, you only have three devices or less that you will want to add, then it's fine to remove things from that list. But you have to bear in mind once you remove it from that list, you cannot put that device back. Now, it's entirely possible that you're talking about devices that haven't been used in years and years, probably safe to remove them. But there's no reason to remove them. And you might risk having, you know, some old device or some device that's connected via one of these, you know, older paths that was grandfathered in and now cannot be re-added. So whatever you remove here, it cannot ever be re-added unless you have two devices or less in that list. So I wouldn't rush out to to clean up this list unless you are certain that you only need three devices or less connected to Dropbox. Otherwise, there's just no benefit to editing this list, just like there wasn't a benefit to editing this list a year ago. Right. There was no reason to do it. Maybe from a security standpoint, sure. If, you know, a device was was taken or something, you can, you know, manage that here. But but in terms of just cleaning up the list, it comes with a potential cost now of not being able to reconnect that device if you happen to remove the wrong one. So got it. Fortunately, I have exactly three devices in my list and don't anticipate needing any more. What are your what are your you have two Macs, an iPad and an iPhone, right? Isn't that for the iPad is not on the list. Got it. Use the iPad. OK. Got it. OK. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've got several iPads that I use because, you know, some really old ones for like, you know, using on stage and things like that or with mixers. And yeah, this is it's I'm going to need to I'm going to either need to pay for Dropbox or leave Dropbox. And the the the issue is that Dropbox is a very good for sharing, you know, with other people. But because of its ubiquity, it's also been baked into a lot of different sort of specialized apps. Like I've got, you know, one of my mixer things will back up to like Dropbox only. That's the only path that the engineers, you know, chose to bake into the software. And I've got some other things like that, too. So I've got to sort of go through all of these things. And I know I'm going to miss one. I'm going to keep my Dropbox account. There's no reason not to. I think I've got up to 25 gigs or 22 gigs free in it because of all the referrals over the years or whatever. But but, you know, I'm going to need to rethink how much I currently rely on it. And and maybe maybe change that. So anyway, it's just one of those things. It's it makes sense from their business model. Like, you know, they used the free thing to gain that ubiquity. Now they have it. They're fairly well cemented in the market. And they want customers that are paying the money. They don't want free customers. I mean, I get that. I don't fault them for this, but it is it is just sort of a shame. It forces some change, either a financial change or a procedural change. So, yeah. Yawvel, anything else to add on that? So other services to use, have you used OneDrive? OneDrive seems to be the one that everyone is recommending. Like by far, people are are are pretty bullish on OneDrive. But Boxes is sort of the other one that that comes up pretty frequently. I like OneDrive, except then I actually just cleaned up this problem here. As you recall, it seems that OneDrive was causing some sort of minor corruption. That's right. Oh, I actually went through. And they actually have a support article. And I went through the steps here, but it involved, you know, it got pretty geeky. I mean, they're like, OK, you know, first, quit all the I think it was quit all the processes because I have some background processes, then go into your key chain and delete the keys, the OneDrive keys, and then open the OneDrive app package. And there's a script in there that resets it. And I think I also deleted the snapshots that were corrupted. But yeah, now I don't get that silly error anymore. Oh, wow. OK, yeah. You can put that OneDrive support article in the show notes. That would be great. Mm hmm. Oh, interesting. And that was a Mojave issue. Is that right? I don't know if it was. I don't know if it was Mojave. Well, I'm running Mojave, but I think it may have been Mojave slash APFS kind of issue. OK, OK. Huh? Yeah, I'll find that. Oh, yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, it might just it might not just be Mojave. It might be anything running APFS. That sounds more sounds more familiar. So OK, well, I put a placeholder in the show notes for it. So to remind us to find that link. So cool. Well, not so cool, but, you know, there we are. So, you know, we move forward together. Speaking of moving forward together, Robert sent in a note. But but he certainly wasn't the only one. He says, Houston, we have a problem. The great app Stringify that Dave put me on to through the show is shutting down. He says, I'm gutted about this as I cannot seem to find an alternative to replace it that has the same range of device supported with the same level of control over them. Do you know of any worth ago? Yeah, Rob, you're totally right. So Stringify is far and away. The best of the smart home. Scripting, but scripting is the wrong word because it's all done graphically with Stringify. But it's the best of those sort of automation services where you can tie everything together. For example, you know, I my favorite script to mention is I have, you know, ring floodlight cam, which can detect motion. And so I have that motion trigger a Stringify flow that they call it or a script that turns on two of my hue bulbs and one of my life ex bulbs, which are all in the driveway, sets them to orange. It this script will only trigger if there's motion and if it's between the hours of 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. So essentially the middle of the night, it will turn them on orange. It will wait, I think five minutes, maybe 10 minutes, whatever I've said it to, and then it will turn them off. So it's for really it's for me. If I'm here, I get home from a gig or whatever. I want the lights in the driveway to come on and stay on, but I don't want them to stay on all night. And so having this functionality is there. If everything you have is home kit, which ring is not. But the other two things I mentioned are, but may not be, depending on what bulbs you own. If everything were home kit, home kit could do this. But this is very much the limit of home kits, sort of, you know, flexibility, this this is this is there. But you will you will then after this, you hit the walls. Whereas with Stringify, you can just like string things together. And this is very graphical thing. You just sort of drop stuff in and and you can see the flow of how things are going to go. It's like, OK, right. That makes sense. And you tie these together and, you know, that sort of thing. Stringify was acquired by Comcast a couple of years ago, maybe a year ago, maybe more. And now they announced you can no longer get the Stringify app in the app store. If you have it, you can still use it. But they said that it will die sometime after June. They said it will it will be available until at least June is I believe how they communicated it. But it means we need to find something else. And so, you know, some folks have suggested using Homebridge, which is an open source thing. It's an engine that you have to run on some device in your home. It can be run on a Mac. It can be installed with with with Homebrew, if you want to do it that way, or it can be installed on a Raspberry Pi or your disk station, right, anything that's just running all the time. And what Homebridge does is it solves that problem of, say, I have my ring device, but it's not HomeKit compatible. Well, you put the ring plug in into Homebridge and then Homebridge advertises your ring device as a HomeKit compatible device. And you can pretty much everything has a plug in for Homebridge. So you could do that and then you could do everything in HomeKit, but you're limited to what HomeKit can do. And that may or may not be a problem, but you are running this sort of, you know, geeky solution depending on how you're running HomeKit. I found it to be, oh, sorry, Homebridge. I found in my setup to be, I found the setup to be unstable. I was running it inside a Docker image on my Synology. I don't think Homebridge in and of itself was unstable. But I think, you know, just the setup of having to keep it running in all that was just it was never entirely reliable. So there's other options. I haven't found a service like Home, like Stringify yet, but there are people talking if you want to run your own thing. The SmartThings hub certainly seems to be the one that has the most flexibility. In fact, it might even have more flexibility than Stringify. It has a language called WebCore that you can program. It's fairly straightforward. But if that really is a scripting language, like you're going to be doing a little bit of coding, it's simple coding, nothing overly complex, but it's certainly doable, especially following examples online and, you know, tweaking from there as we always do. But yeah, it's not like I said, it's not a good week for technology. You you have a SmartThings hub that you just got. Have you messed with WebCore or anything yet, John? Not yet. And I looked at the but it looks to have more options within the app to do smart things than the Wink. Right. And I only tried to pair the problem is if you have a smart home hub, like a Wink 2, or SmartThings hub, one thing that I found is I was like, huh, you know, I wonder if I can have both environments talk to my smart IOT, you know, smart devices. And I think the answer is maybe. And then I tried to pair it with one thing. So one thing I got as a WiIMO plug, plugged it to a humidifier, which actually I should put away. But I was able when I tried to set up a bulb with the SmartThings hub, it actually found the WIMO humidifier control, and I was able to use both environments to control that. But like I said, my bulbs, it seems it wants to be paired with either one or the other. It doesn't look like I compare both of the hubs to a single device. Yeah, that's I think that's that's right. You you're like low energy devices like the bulbs or whatever that aren't Wi-Fi. Generally can only be paired to one hub. The only kind of sort of caveat there is if that hub, like say the Philips Hue hub, is home kit compatible. Now you can like it feels like your bulbs are home kit bulbs. They are not right. They are paired to a thing that is home kit compatible being the, you know, the Philips Hue hub. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I'm curious what you think. We're relying on you, John, to find our path here and see if WebCore with SmartThings is perhaps the right path to go. And you said that SmartThings hub was only was less than 100 bucks. Is that right? Yeah, it was like 60 bucks or something. That's great. Yeah, the Wink 2 is 99. So any of these hubs, you know, would be pretty affordable, but that was more affordable. Yeah. At least as capable. Oh, I think it's way more capable than the Wink 1. I don't think it supports quite as many. The Wink 2 supports, I think it supports more protocols, including some weird semi proprietary ones. I mean, they both support, I think, Z-Wave and what's the other one? Z-Link, I think. Yeah, so we're talking about this from two different angles. And you're totally right that the Wink hub hardware-wise supports more things, but the SmartThings hub software-wise is far more capable as a home automation controller. And you don't have to have your devices paired with it in order for it to trigger them, right? If you've got something that has a web hook, SmartThings can control that, right? Let's say you have a, you know, SmartThings could trigger off of your ring camera, even though your ring device doesn't actually pair on a hardware level with your SmartThings hub. But it can talk to that web hook and send data to it and receive data from it. And that's the beauty of this whole web core kind of thing. And you can do some of this in the SmartThings app too. I think that web core is just far more flexible. But yeah, so from a software standpoint, having a SmartThings hub in your home, even if your hardware was all paired to Wink, it would be interesting to see. You might actually be able to get SmartThings to control the Wink devices, right? Because it becomes that hub, even though hardware-wise you're not connecting anything to it. There's two ways, and really, you need to look at them both in parallel from that standpoint. Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious to see. But I would love to see if you could have it. So if your doorbell rings, can you have it flickered one of your lights in your house? It's not related to ring. No, but that's like the beauty of these kinds of things is taking these disparate tech, stuff from different hardware vendors and tying them together. And HomeKit does that too. It just, things have to be HomeKit compatible. In the chat room here, someone asked, why not use ift with its webhooks? Because that's what ift does as well. My issue with ift is that it doesn't support parallel triggers. So for example, I said, if it's between midnight and 6 a.m. and there is this event from this ring thing that happens to be aimed at the driveway. If there's motion on ring camera number one and it's between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m., now go do a thing, then wait, now go do another thing. So this parallel triggers and cascading events was not something that ift was built to do at its core and I have never found a way to get ift to do it. So that's where ift falls apart for me. I use it for several things. It's great for exactly what it is. Ift is iftt, and it stands for if this, then that. So it's a very straightforward thing. If one thing happens, then go do another thing. There is no, you know, cascading and parallelizing these sorts of things. However, the Amazon ALEXA device does have a lot of these features in it and also can be your smart home hub. And they very recently, I did not know this until I started digging in this week and somebody pointed it out to me, they added a weight trigger to this. So that's super handy. So that, you know, that allows for these, you know, more capable and more complex things. So, you know, there's hope out there. We're not the only ones that want to do this stuff. So and if you have the, you know, the Amazon A-Lady, you might already have what you need. So, well, the short version is I'm not making any radical changes in my home setup yet. I have at least a couple of months with Stringify still working because I was already using it. But I obviously will have to make a change on this one, unlike Dropbox where I could just pay and, you know, solve the problem. I can't pay and solve this problem. It's literally going away. So we'll pick something, but we'll tell you. Yeah, you know, yeah. I should play with that. I started to try, yeah. So per your suggestion, I actually went to ift and because you were like, you don't quite understand what it is. And I'm like, yes, you're right. So I went and, you know, I created a, and I created my first script and for an applet. Yeah, right. Yeah. But it's a script. And it works great. But yeah, I see there's, there's, yeah, you have a Wink module. They got a SmartThings module. They got an eWave. Yeah. So I should go to the next level and make it control one of my, or do something with one of my devices. Yeah, there was something I was using with Stringify that Stringify didn't have a module for. But Stringify has an ift module. So I actually created these, you know, linked, you know, whatever recipes or whatever you want to call them. And it was like, okay, you know, Stringify will do its thing. The trigger happens. And then we need to trigger a device that Stringify can't talk to. So go tell ift to do it and you're good to go. So yeah, it's crazy. But, you know, this is, this is where it gets fun. Home automation is still very much the realm of the geeky with, and I'll say this with the exception of HomeKit and, and at some level, the Amazon A lady, like it's a little, more geeky than HomeKit just to set up. But it works fairly well. But again, you know, you kind of live within the constraints of that in order to have the simpler interface. So yeah. All right. I have no idea where to go from here. We have all kinds of things to talk about. We have a lot of cool stuff found. I feel like we should jump to that. So we will. But the first thing I want to do here is talk about our sponsor, which is Malwarebytes for Mac. Malwarebytes for Mac. You can go to Malwarebytes.com slash Mac, and that's where you can download this. It's available for free. You can scan your Mac for free. It's actually fantastic. 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You know, we as Mac users are fortunate that not a ton of viruses in malware have been written for us over the years but that's changing, you know as Macs are getting more and more popular there is more stuff to worry about so running something that's not going to slow down your Mac to keep your Mac from getting slowed down from these other things is exactly what you want and you can do that so visit malwarebytes.com slash Mac, you can download it for free and with that you get a 14 day trial of their premium offering so you can see what that's all about and kind of make your decisions from there so go check it out, malwarebytes.com slash Mac it's free to download, you know there you go, there's no credit card or anything you just download it and you can run it and you can see what it's all about go do it and our thanks to Malwarebytes for Mac for sponsoring this episode alright John yeah let's jump to do some of this cool stuff maybe we'll circle back around to another question here the first comes from show756 and listener Mark who we were talking about we asked for a geek challenge about a car Bluetooth adapter and he says I've been using the Anker Rove ROAV's Anker's Rove brand spelling Smart Charge Car Kit F2 he says I've seen it for under 30 bucks on Amazon the device connects to your phone Bluetooth and then plays through your car stereo using the FM radio there's a companion app that lets you change the FM channel find where you parked with GPS and monitor your car's battery voltage he says I used it to listen to music and podcasts in the car and also of course hands free calling the Rove plugs into the 12 volt port on your car and has a microphone for making calls also has two USB ports on it one of which is a high speed charging port to charge your devices and it also has two USB ports playing a music off of a USB thumb drive and has a line in jack as well wow this thing's got everything says my only complaint with the device is that it has no way to trigger Siri voice controls to initiate the phone call or start music there is an answer hang up button as well as a skip forward or back on the device very nice little add on for the price he says yeah sounds like it that's awesome that would actually be something for you we have several to talk about here I'm surprised all the stuff they crammed into that yeah it's pretty good anchors good at that man that's like their stock and trade Greg hips us to another one that he says what Brian need Brian was the listener in the last show that had asked for advice on this says what he needs is a wired FM modulator is inserted between the cars antenna and the radios antenna in jack the modulator has an ox in jack and I think some may have Bluetooth built in too says the modulator also has a switch that filters in the car antenna resulting in static free connections unlike a wireless FM transmitter he says I'm not handy so I had mine professionally installed but maybe what Brian will have luck doing it himself and he sent us a link to this I had totally forgotten about this entire concept but there is a standard jack on the back of your car radio for the car antenna to just plug into and of course it of course it's a standard jack that way if they ever have to replace the radio or whatever they just unplug the antenna and plug it right back in very very simple and this device sits in line you unplug the antenna from your car radio you plug this device into your car and you plug the antenna back into this thing and it just sort of hijacks or can hijack that signal coming in as he said as soon as it kicks in it filters out any signal coming from the antenna so you're not getting interference which is pretty cool and I did one of these with a I think I added a CD player to my car like when I was in high school or something and I used one of these because it gave the best sound quality my radio didn't have a line in jack if it did that would have been even better but mine didn't so it was like okay we'll hijack the antenna stream yeah that's pretty cool and there are some of these for about 50 bucks you get Bluetooth and everything else that you would want so it's pretty good I like this and really not that difficult the hardest part is getting to the back of your car radio sometimes on some cars that's super easy you don't even have to like and screw anything you just sort of climb under and under like the dash or whatever and it's right there and other times it's not but you know thankfully now unlike when I was in high school you have YouTube so you can check your car and someone will tell you how to do it and show you how it's done which is even better thoughts on that one Mr. Braun moving on moving on Keith for the same question says he says without knowing the make and model it's impossible to suggest something specific however my old car radio is without Bluetooth and I bought something called it's from a company called any car at anycarlink.com A-N-Y-C-A-R-L-I-N-K .com and they have them for every different model of car he says it connects to the CD changer socket on the back of the radio which is a functional socket unlike a line in jack where it just provides audio this one it can take the audio but it can also allow you to use the controls on the radio or the steering wheel so if your car has a CD in jack and you have these controls on the steering wheel this anycarlink device will translate those over Bluetooth to your phone so you can change tracks and do all of that cool stuff so that's definitely worth checking out at anycarlink.com really cool solution that you know your car has a CD player which most cars sold in the last whatever 10-15 years do that might allow you to kind of jack into that too pretty good yeah I know alright let's see Bruce what were we talking about oh yeah in the last episode actually we were talking about a couple of different things he says Bruce says in the 756 somebody wrote in asking about the various names that might be assigned to a given Mac there's a utility at what route.net called system name for finding out and editing all of the various names for your Mac very cool I agree that's pretty good he says also in terms of monitoring what's happening with your wifi signal in real time there's an app from Adrian Granados who makes wifi explorer which we mentioned in the last episode this other app is called wifi signal which he says for five bucks is an excellent menu utility for displaying everything you Dave in particular he says I think we both want to know about our wifi connections he says it alerts you via notification when your Mac switches to a different base station or network or even a different access point even if it's the same network you can be alerted to all of that that might actually be really helpful for you John with your bathroom testing and all that stuff yeah that's pretty cool thank you Bruce this is why we do these cool stuff found fun little utilities anything on either of those John before we move on to the next one that comes out of 756 I'm going to have to download all this stuff I know thankfully most of this well actually no one of them is free one of them is not but that's okay you know we want to support these developers if we wind up using it Gary writes you might like this John he says in the last show you were talking about Verizon's call filter and AT&T's call protect he says there's another app that was recommended to me and it has top status on its various app stores when you search for these type of call blocking apps he says this app is called RoboKiller and it blocks known spam callers and so forth similar to No More Robo but the difference is that this one gives you the option to scam the scammer once you install the app you have to activate it on your phone by placing a one time call to its dedicated number the call will play a recorded message telling you that all the calls in its database will be forwarded to this number the app has a feature called answer bots that you can use and choose the type of answer bots that you want used he says I just have mindset to random to give you a disclosure saying that you are responsible for the results but if it means that you don't get the call but the robot does I think it's worth it he says the app's not free however you have to pay either $3 a month or $25 a year and it is constantly updated including the database of course and he says the app works with carriers who support the select forward and Verizon and AT&T and most of the others do it's the same feature that you would use if you wanted to have Google Voice answering your calls you type in a thing into your phone it's like a star star whatever code and it does the select forwarding or whatever but that's pretty cool I like having a robot that answers the phone and maybe takes the scammer down a path that's pretty good I like that you might have to sign up for that John this might bring you great joy you might see or might be the most joyous $25 you spend yeah I like the current offering man these guys are persistent it's like yeah one day it flagged like a whole bunch uh I mean there was one they like called and no answer none they called like an hour later and it's like stop yeah so I just hide light and say put it on my block list and then I don't hear from them again then you're good to go yeah exactly uh listener Joe hipped us to a device called the touchy base uh it's on Kickstarter so all the Kickstarter disclaimers apply you are essentially you know a venture capitalist funding this thing and it may or may not ever see the light of day but it looks cool enough that it's worth mentioning we ignore a lot of the Kickstarter things here that this one's cool so it's called the touchy base TOQI touchy right base and uh it's a desk lamp uh it could be a night stand lamp with several chi plat uh contacts on it several chi coils on it and you can put your phone on there you can put your watch on there um it's got a usb power out the back both for chi and sorry for usb-c and usb-a uh it's got an AirPods dock for your AirPods uh charging case right so you drop it in it's got the little lightning connector you drop it in you're good to go so this is pretty cool uh you know and the watch can can be you can do it flat or it can kind of sit up so you can see it like uh you know like the like you're and whatever they call it night stand mode there you go so yeah pretty cool and I think you can back it for 69 bucks now to get to get one of these maybe in july if it you know if it if it succeeds but I think it's does it hit its goal yeah yeah they had a $5,000 goal and they're at 10 grand so it this will fund so bear that in mind while you uh while you do this so pretty good thanks for that joe fun stuff I hope I hope this one makes it I don't know if I'm gonna back it or not um but I like the idea it's good thoughts on that John before we move on to James James no it's a nice combo I remember seeing something similar at CES it was yeah a lamp and a charger and some other things too yeah yeah that's pretty cool yeah uh all right a couple more cool stuff found here a few more actually James uh hit us to something called page turn for iOS uh he says Dave I thought you may may be interested in this because it lets you turn pages in sheet music or documents doesn't have to be sheet music but it can be uh with facial gestures and it uses the true depth camera on the iPhone 10 and and you know 10 series iPhone so all of them the 10R the 10S 10S Max etc and also of course on the 2018 iPad pro which is the same tech that lets face ID and Memoji work so if you got face ID you can use this app uh and it watches your expression and you can like wink or I think you can set what you want the uh the expression to be I haven't tried this app but I've played games with it where you like you raise your eyebrow uh you know your left eyebrow your right eyebrow or whatever to you know to play a game and like move something around on the screen and it's pretty flawless like the detection is pretty good how quick it it works and and it's certainly doable so I could see this being being functional uh in a in a meaningful way it's pretty cool huh John me yeah you're the John you're the only one I get to talk to like and get responses back from while we do this right pretty cool yes okay um I spoke for the Chicago uh the greater Chicago I actually don't even know where I spoke yesterday I mean I sort of do but uh Dave Ginsburg who is in the chat room and we mentioned earlier because he had the right answer for us um he he organizes his group there I spoke there yesterday morning Saturday morning I should say and uh and while we were talking uh as as I got going I talked about wi-fi but he said you might want to know about presenter mode in pages for iPad that has auto scroll so you can have a document in pages and you go to the three little dots uh I think in the corner and you can turn on presenter mode and check the box that says auto scroll and you can set the speed too and it essentially turns your iPad into a makeshift teleprompter where you know you just gotta you've got to get the pacing right and obviously practice with that or whatever but uh but yeah what a what a cool thing so that's why it's a cool thing it's cool stuff found there you go and then there were there were two others there was one that I came across for myself again I spoke earlier in the week down in Princeton New Jersey for their Mac user group and um spoke about backups for them and was reminded as I was preparing and talking with them about something from SomaZone called backup loop l-o-u-p-e time machine is great it can be great can also be kind of a pain in the neck but it's a it's a good part it's a good thing to have in your backup stack uh but sometimes it can be mysterious you don't necessarily know what it is backing up or certainly what it has backed up and sometimes you might see that oh it's backing up three gigs of data it's like what in the last hour changed that I have three gigs of data to backup backup loop shows you the contents of each individual backup that you have in your time machine library so you can see what things were backed up at each interval and that can be really handy uh from a troubleshooting standpoint if you're trying to figure out what what three gigabyte thing is getting backed up every single hour and it might be some log file that's just being touched once or something and it has grown bigger whatever but it's super handy to be able to dig in and so backup loop will do that for you and it works with mojave I've tested it uh I in it this is definitely a cool stuff found reprise because we've talked about backup loop in the past but I think it's been a good long while so pretty good huh John yeah I just started revisiting it myself yeah I had something similar it was like why are you backing up 300 gigabytes yeah which it was doing well yes I I actually couldn't use backup loop to solve my problem because I I couldn't complete my first time machine backup on my machine in the office it was um it like so I can't see the contents but it was telling me it had to back up way more than I was throwing at it well turns out the next thing on the cool stuff found list did help me clean my mac 10 or clean my mac x whatever you like to call it added a new feature this week called space lens which is a new way of looking at all of the storage being used on your device when we've talked about other apps like daisy disk and and clean my mac has had a similar functionality but space lens is new a new way of looking at it omni disk sweepers another one but as we've talked about like omni disc sweeper and and even daisy disk weren't finding these things because omni disc sweepers sort of weird to run in administrator mode and daisy disk I don't know why wasn't finding this but space lens did and it found that I had some files in private var db that were like 500 gigs now my ssd in my iMac in the office is only 500 gigs so I knew they weren't really it wasn't really 500 gigs but it was a I think a sparse bundle or something that could grow up to a maximum of 500 gigs so reports to the file system is 500 but it's not actually taking up that much space this new thing and the space lens in clean my mac 10 did find it which was helpful because that was the problem with my time machine backups and it was I'll put a link to this it was files that started with atps and I think it was the acronis backup software it acronis is true image and their active protection they do things like to protect you against ransomware where your drive gets encrypted or whatever they save this stuff in a way that that you could restore but it for whatever reason it tricks the file system so if you want to use acronis true image you just tell time machine don't back up that folder and then you're good to go I haven't been using it on that particular mac so I just took it off but and remove the files but but yeah this I'm liking space lens it scan the drive really quickly and you can look in you know kind of a typical list view sorted by what's taking up the most space but you can also it's like this bubble lens view where it shows things you know proportion to their to their sizes yeah yeah so if you got clean my mac 10 you're already good to go so yeah I got it and actually I just ran it and I got a little alert saying hey here's what's new and also it says set up in that window so I guess it's part of set up and clean my mac well it's made by the same people that make mac paw make set up and clean my mac so yeah clean my mac is part of set up that's right yep which is handy yeah yeah yeah it is good all right we have some we have some questions I want to get to the let's circle back to Chris and Andrew and then we'll do two Andrews in a row is what we're going to do here so we'll start with Chris um Chris writes my existing macs are old says I have a 2010 mac book pro that's on its last legs he says I've already replaced its workload with a 10 and a half inch ipad pro my wife's 2011 iMac died recently because of the graphics card so I migrated all of our important items documents most importantly in a fully downloaded photos library to what was our kids mac mini that we had connected to a TV on our playroom we have one we have more than one iOS device per person and they two terabyte iCloud storage plan for all of our documents but everyone's and it documents photos and videos says with a 13 year old daughter who has a larger photo library than mine or my wife's keeping those safe is a major concern ultimately this mac mini is having issues as well I have four user accounts on it and moving between them is excruciatingly glacier like not to mention about a third of the time when I log into my account I go into a cycle where I get a black blank screen and about 30 or 45 minutes later the login screen appears as though nothing has happened I know the hard drive is a major bottleneck on the system but I decided I don't want to put any additional money into this computer when instead I could upgrade to a newer mac mini my wife used used to use her iMac more frequently but now she has a school Chromebook and she mostly uses that at home because I almost bought a new mac book air but I can only afford currently to buy replace one computer and I really want to hub for all of our cloud items to live physically in our home and then get backed up locally and back plays and all that so I've settled on a new mac mini but based on prices I think I'm going to go with the entry level machine I currently have my wife's photo library on the internal hard drive of my mini plus mine on my daughter's external SSD so here are my questions migration assistant my first thought is set up from scratch and use target disk mode to drag over the necessary files how can I move the existing external SSD to the new computer without having to jump through too many hoops downloading multiple photos libraries from the cloud is problematic due to my Xfinity data cap what should go on to the new internal SSD which will likely be 128 gig and what's best for the external drive and if I really stretched I could afford the six core version of this but is that really going to make a difference other than the fact that the double internal SSD would likely keep me from needing a new external up front and lastly my wife and I both you have Apple watches does the unlock feature work on multiple user accounts so I'll start with that one because that's the easy one yes watch unlock is a user account setting so yeah you can unlock your user and she'll be able to unlock hers going I'm actually going to keep going backwards on this one because I think talking about which machine to get is the right one next and looking I you know I you asked about performance I look in Mac tracker which is great because it has performance scores from geek bench in there and you turn me on to that Mr. Braun that's a it's a great resource having everything right there we'd love Mac tracker looking at that you know the high end CPU in the 1299 Mac mini is almost twice as fast as the entry level CPU and in there will it make a difference so eventually yeah I think so from a longevity standpoint I think you will hit a point down the road where that you know three that's slower and less cores will max out before you you know before before the the faster I think which is 99 or 98 I can't remember which which model it is but but anyway oh it's a 8th gen 99 I think is what it is but but yeah I think so I think it'll make a difference again down the road out of the gate probably not it's going to be whatever you get way faster than what you currently have and will run everything you need but you know depending on how long you plan to keep this machine you tend to keep things for a little while that this may make a difference down the road and the CPU is the one thing that no matter how willing you are to rip that thing apart you are not going to change so so that is that is a permanent decision at least for this machine did you have any thoughts on that John or feel differently or go um I think they're all fast enough as you pointed out yeah yeah right right but but if you were advising him which as it turns out we are what would you what would you advise so it's an i7 on the top end it's an i3 on the bottom end and i7 on the top end again compared to my current machine which uh I mean it depends on if you're doing something that requires what I call heavy lifting you can tell what that's happening if you get a tool which I think we're going to talk about that shortly but you know look at what you do day to day and see if any of these benchmarking tools show that you are consuming a lot of any particular resource whether it be CPU or GPU or things like that right yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah I mean next because I can see two classes of users one you know power user like people that do photoshop or you know video editing and stuff like that um yeah I don't think that's them but you know but again like I find you know I have a 2011 iMac still running in the house I think no no no I have it's either a 2007 or 2008 running in the house it has plenty of RAM uh it plenty of storage but the CPU is the thing that you know it is pegged all of the time that wasn't the case when I bought it right is like when I when I bought it it was totally fine because the OS was you know not maxing out the CPU in fact when I bought it the drive was the slow thing right it has an SS there now I've upgraded it to an SSD so the drive bottleneck is gone um but even when I did the SSD upgrade like the CPU wasn't pegged all the time now it is if I if it had a faster CPU in it that machine would be more usable today um no I don't I think I got it with the fastest CPU then I mean it you know the machine's 12 years old or something so like it doesn't owe me anything but um but I that's why I think you know if if you are someone that keeps your machines for a long time I think buying the the fastest CPU that you can afford out of the gate because it's not replaceable it's not upgradeable down the road that that that's where that's sort of where my thought process goes to so you can do RAM on the new Mac mini on your own it's about a 20 minute tour in and out if you're comfortable with that sort of thing so you're not paying Apple's RAM prices so and then of course you know the SSD it's got thunderbolt ports on the back so you can do whatever you want with it it's also got USB A ports on the back which is great you've got both um you know and so you can expand that with high speed drives and you're good to go so I wouldn't worry about worry about that but yeah alright uh let's see where are we here uh yeah okay um so while we're oh we have to we we're still on Chris here um in terms of what to put on the internal drive versus external drives I would put macOS obviously you're gonna boot from that internal drive although there's an argument to be made for booting from the external um but I would I think I think even with the 128 gig drive you can put macOS and your you know generic user accounts and documents it's you can have your user accounts external but man like that's a headache but I would not put itunes or photos on that internal drive I would I would continue to use you know external drive for photos and I would also move your iTunes library the nice part about both of those libraries is you can relocate them to an external drive in a way that is fully supported by Apple you can do it right inside the app so you're not you know jury-rigging something in a way that that's gonna bite you down the road like this is fully supported it's time honored tradition it's all good um but I think on what your how big your documents folders are you probably probably are okay um if you're not you certainly can offload documents to an external drive or you said you use iCloud storage so you could click that optimize storage on your Mac button and it will only download the documents that you want but to your point I think you want this to have everything so maybe the documents wind up being on an external drive if you've got big stuff you know if you're working on you know if you're creating family movies and things like that you know put those projects external but the thoughts on that Mr. Braun before we talk about where how to migrate his stuff uh let's go so your photos libraries you talked about wanting to have uh you have them on the external drive with your current machine and how to get those on the new machine without re-downloading everything you there's really good news here because those photos libraries are entirely self contained uh wherever they are stored so if they are stored on the external drive this is the best case scenario for you you will take that external drive you will plug it into the new Mac and then you will go into photos and you will tell photos I want to use actually really the best thing to do is launch photos with the option key held down and choose a photos library it you can have multiple photos libraries going simultaneously and you will just point it at the one on the external drive and you're done like it shouldn't need to download anything because that library is self contained and that library knows that it already has everything from the cloud so this this should be a very very quick process for you it it might do a little bit of re-sinking but even that re-sinking doesn't move a lot of data back and forth even though it says it does it really doesn't but I don't even think you'll run into that you should be ok which leads us to the first and now final question migration assistant or manual you know either option is going to be fine migration assistant is certainly going to be simpler in the short term because it gets you up and running and all your settings and everything are exactly like you had but you know that's an old machine which means you probably haven't started from scratch in a good long time it's really not that difficult to do the manual migration if you are able to have the old machine up and running for a little while while you have you know this new one then you know that's not so bad to move things back and forth I would I say this but you know I know how time constraints are certainly I would do it as a new you know a new new setup and then just manually migrate I don't think you're going to hate yourself if you do migration assistant either what do you think John I'm a big fan of it yeah it works really really well it's crazy but you know it works alright moving on to Andrew yes John yes so Andrew writes he says I just purchased a similar vein here a 2017 MacBook Air at most he says I'll be using it for school assignments and some basic web design stuff developing WordPress, Joomla PrestaShop sites says what are the programs that you two would consider essential for a new Mac I'm not totally new to the Mac because I've owned a couple but I'm far more used to Windows okay so John and I to limit our lists of things that we can't live without but we definitely want your feedback on this too so so John why don't you start and list your I don't know top three or four and then I'll list top three or four and then we'll probably want to add a couple more to the list because you know we're geeks but can't live without not would be nice to have but I would say let's go for can't live without apps okay that's what I'm going to give you here so I stat menus okay hardware growler debuki tools and fruit juice this is fascinating okay I love this I mean everybody that has listened long enough knows that you and I approach things very very differently and like there's a theme to your can't live without apps these are I need to know what my system is doing um and I would anticipate what if something starts going wrong what if the machine is not doing what I want sure all of these tools to varying degrees will do that for you yep they know it's totally true these are your you know real time diagnostic tools if if you will for sure so um I have my own list I had one thing in common and that was I stat menus because I like to see what's going on for sure but my list is well is going to is going to betray my priorities here keyboard might and this is not in any particular order I wouldn't necessarily put keyboard Maestro first but but it they're all sort of equally can't live without keyboard Maestro text expander default folder mail act on and I'm going to cheat and go to a fifth one bartender which we've actually already mentioned in the show because you were saying you needed it so these mine are clearly all about productivity and automation and making things happen faster um and without these things especially I could probably I could live without bartender um but the other ones here I equate it to typing with mittens on like I would feel so slowed down if I didn't have all of these things keyboard Maestro keeps my life in order um you know with it's the future of automation on the Mac right text expander I'm I like text expander I probably could do 80% of what I want to do in text expander with keyboard Maestro but I but not a hundred so there you go default folder I like Mac OS has some functionality like this built in but open save dialogues and being able to move around with default folder makes life way easier and then mail act on I'm totally addicted to for the way I can file mail very quickly with it probably not quite as universal in its in its use fullness or appeal but certainly for me I live an email all day long and and I get to not take my hands off the keyboard and still file mail exactly where I want and do things that I want with it which is you know that's what it's that's what it's there for so any do you have any any one thing to add John we want to hear from you folks for sure but uh but you know yeah there you go I got like a secondary list but you there's like 10 things on it okay all right you let me look at um you know I'll throw one more out here yeah go ahead please kind of a productivity thing um and it's typically something I install on a new machine uh app cleaner oh yeah oh that reminds me of Hazel app doesn't do a good a good job of getting rid of all of the parts of an application now yes you could throw an application away sure that doesn't that typically does not get rid of the support libraries and all the stuff buried in your system and you don't want to leave that around maybe not so much for space reasons but you don't want these low-level modules start fighting and then screwing things up and we've seen that happen a lot so something like that and Hazel does something similar yeah but it's smart enough to say okay well you want to get rid of the app um and it actually proactively comes up and says oh yeah by the way um you want to get rid of all these other things that I think that that I I'm pretty sure this app yeah along to this app as well and I'm like yep so helps you keep your system running stable and clean yeah it does um I would point out I use Hazel it has that functionality in it but I use it as part of my automation workflow because it does like watched folders and and things like that which is awesome um in the chat room though Mac Vader points out that clean my Mac 10 also has a fun bit of functionality that will um remove you know do your app cleaning for you and honestly it's probably better than either of the ones that we've mentioned because um Hazel will do it automatically like it watches what you're doing and will offer but to my knowledge once it has offered whether you accept or decline you cannot go back and say I want to do that again app cleaner doesn't do it in an automated way but you can say go and like do this clean my Mac 10 does both and so you can see a list of apps that it thinks you should clean junk from um and it will actually you know kind of keep that up to date but when you when you throw an app away it will also prompt you hey do you want to like clean this stuff up or not you know so yeah good stuff all right well we'll we'll we'll stop this segment there um but I would uh I would definitely want to you know please encourage you to do this Dan I will throw out Dan says um uh a clipboard manager and that is perhaps why keyboard maestro lives at the top of my list because yes it's the future of automation on the Mac but it also has a clipboard manager in it like once you live with a clipboard history of some sort there is no going back because I will just throw things on my clipboard uh and then go like you know I'll be in a web page I'll copy the URL maybe the title and some things about it and then you know replying to you folks or whatever it's like oh okay I want to now I want to link you to this and do this and do that and I don't have to worry about it because I know it's all in my clipboard history and I can just choose which ones I want and paste them in and so yeah yeah yeah it's good clipboard manager bite like if you don't have one of those start using one and then you will never be able to go back but it's like it's a good place to be yeah yeah you want to take us to go ahead I will but App Cleaner does have a smart mode where people throw something trash it pops in they call it smart delete I had no idea yeah they didn't use to at some point they added it and I was like wow that's really clever oh that's good and I believe it's free though you can certainly throw some money yeah yeah exactly developer which I think I have in the past cool yeah let's go to uh the other Andrew because um yeah I think pretty quick here and I think this one is interesting and applicable um and actually you will see that uh I posted a follow up but the original note for me Andrew was as follows I have a late 2013 macro pro which I absolutely love mama don't take my usb ports sd card slot and full-size mcdm hdmi port away sorry for the simon garfunkel aside but those are some of the reasons why I'm holding on to this one and I would concur with my machine as well but to continue when running onyx recently it told me that I needed to repair the drive a one terabyte original apple ssd this has happened before and in that case I booted from an external drive then went into this utility was able to choose laptops drive and run this repair this time the repair repeatedly fails do you have any other suggestions for me maybe using another utility also I can't boot into recovery mode my mac thinks I want to reinstall the os after I restart and hold down what are any suggestions for that all right so few things here so yeah I won't go into detail about my mid 2012 15 inch macro pro which I love to death you guys can get all your ports though you can get all your ports with a with a thunderbolt hub it really like it it's a I I really like this new like hub world because I can just add I know I want yeah yeah it's just that I have to you know get a dock or cables or new stuff correct yes absolutely yeah but that's the price of progress I guess right right exactly so as far as macOS recovery first I found that it can be very picky regarding the timing of holding down command R and Apple actually suggests in their article called macOS recovery they say what you should do is turn on your machine and then hold down command R I'm going to tell you the right way to do it how about holding down command R first and then hitting the power button oh does that work well we'll follow up in a moment on that okay but that was my one suggestion so second well normally you should be able to boot from the recovery partition unless it's screwed up or something guess what you can actually load a version of recovery from the internet Steve I kind of knew this I don't think I've ever tried it yeah the key combination is slightly different it's option command R or shift option command R now what happens is when you start up if the machine is connected to a network then it will you'll see a little spinning glow but it'll start downloading recovery from the internet isn't that neat and if it's a Wi-Fi then it'll ask you to connect to your Wi-Fi network and it'll download it over that it'll take too long for me like maybe three minutes sure and then all of a sudden you get the same recovery so keep in mind that you can download recovery from the internet and and then it's the same old thing alright yeah I like it I don't know that I knew that that's interesting cool so keep in mind if you can't as for disrepair as far as I can tell this utility is just running and I think it's APFS underscore FSCK which is the UNIX utility for fixing drives and I don't think it's very thorough I'll just throw out one suggestion although I haven't really used it in a while but I hear diskwarrior is a better tool for repairing damage yeah it's tough with APFS now right because we don't have decades of history that these third-party utilities can use to build some functionality so I'm like yeah I don't know the there's not much that can do it some of these third-party utilities drive genius at some level diskwarrior at a better level can repair APFS volumes but this is why backups are important because our knowledge of what problems look like is a far more limited sample set right now with APFS than it is with HFS Plus and because of that the repair options are also far more constrained and limited with APFS so there might be scenarios where the only way to fix it is to wipe the drive and restore it from a clone thankfully cloning and all of that is fairly easy in common place now so you should always have a clone that's my advice and if worse comes to worse you update your clone, you wipe the drive and you know restore from the clone good to go yeah and the follow up per mandrew was that my suggestion to change the sequence of where you hold things down did it exactly did exactly what he wanted when he was able to run it there was a minor there was a minor let's see it was invalid volume free block count oh and it fixed that so apparently having that free block count off caused the machine to think that you were wanting to reinstall the OS which is kind of wacky huh huh so so it was able to repair the damage which is great I'm curious about this sequence thing because I have like this is just an experiential thing so I may be entirely wrong on this certainly you know with newer max but I thought any keys that were held down prior to start up would be ignored by macOS as you know as the system was starting up I thought you had to push them down like maybe right after you hit the power button but I thought it was I thought there was something in there where you know I always wait till the chime and as soon as I hear the chime even begin now I know okay I can I can hit my magic buttons but have you tried it with the oh yeah with it down before you turn it on it does work okay that's good yeah okay yeah the thing that the problem is that again their advice to first power up wait for the chime and then hold it down I think what happens with a lot of people is that if you hold it down even a millisecond after the chime ends it's not going to see it it's not going to see that's right yeah right when you hear the chime and the chime if you even get a chime right yeah right right which could yes exactly yep yeah because your your newer newer machines don't the newer portables don't uh I forgot what they stopped doing but they don't chime anymore right that is correct yeah honestly I don't even notice it anymore but yes that is correct yeah yeah yeah yeah cool all right well um you know there is one thing that I want to share it's a quick one I promise and I know we're already past where we would be be leaving the show so I will I will get right to it because it's something I didn't know about and I think is something really handy TJ replied to something we were talking about in the last episode we and actually been talking about for several episodes and I kind of want to put this to bed where I it started with me talking about how I keep a landline so that a phone can ring in the house at night even if do not disturb is on even if the mute switch is on and we talked about how you know even if you set people to you know in your favorites list or whatever and they can bypass your do not disturb with the mute switch on you know your phone's not going to make a noise TJ points out that that can be incorrect statement he says go to a contact edit the contact this is on your iPhone and tap on ringtone you know you can set custom ringtones for a contact and there is an option there for emergency bypass the fine print says emergency bypass allows sounds and vibrations from this person even with do not disturb even when do not disturb is on but in his experience it also over rides the mute switch and you can do the same thing for text tone if you want to bypass this stuff for text messages too now with great power comes great responsibility because it means that even when you hit your mute switch when you say go into a meeting or a movie or you know you know presentation that your boss is giving your phone will make a noise if this person calls or if you turn it off for texting return to turn emergency bypass on for texting also them too but it is good to know that this is there so bear this in mind emergency bypass on iOS and that that's all I have to say about that do you have anything to say about that before we before we move on here John and by move on I mean I mean I typically have my I almost always have mine on mute right oh same yeah and so this would bypass that I really feel like you should turn it on for me so you can always hear what I'm calling you you know there you go no no yep all right well we broke the hour and a half mark with this episode but that's okay we had lots to talk about and really we have lots more to talk about we could we could end this show and record the next one it's awesome you folks send in so much great stuff not just great questions but obviously great tips and you know great cool stuff found your I love that not only are you listening but you know you're applying and engaging and like it's a conversation that we're having here during the show it's a conversation that John and I are having with actually and also with the folks in the chat room at mackykeb.com slash stream but all week it's a conversation that we're all having you can join in the conversation if you want to be a little more interactive at our forums at mackykeb.com slash forums you can if you're a premium subscriber you can email us premium at mackykeb.com of course you can learn more about that at mackykeb.com slash premium so thank you to everybody it's really so awesome thanks to cash fly for providing the bandwidth to get the show from us to you this week I'm going to thank Amazon for having Amazon Prime and me being able to order something i.e. a new mixer at 5 o'clock p.m. on Thursday and have it arrive at 10 a.m. on Saturday that was pretty good very thankful for that thankful for our sponsors as we mentioned in the show of course we have malware bites at malware bites dot com slash mac in the podcast marketplace of course we have smile at smile software dot com slash podcast we have other world computing at max sales dot com bare bone software at bare bones dot com ero at ero dot com slash m g g and we've got some more coming too it's fun stuff i love it thanks john this was a fun one thanks everybody for listening you brought us into this mess 757 another airplane episode what do you have to say for yourself anything to share i got nothing well no i have one no i have two i have three things for you Dave and they are don't get caught may not