 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 700. Woo-hoo, for Monday, March 12th, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show that takes your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, all of it. We mix it all together, we share answers, we share everything here with the goal of learning at least five new things every single episode. That's every week, every time we get together, the goal, all of us, every one of us. Me included five new things, two new sponsors for this episode that include Ring, where at ring.com slash MGG, you can save up to one hundred and fifty bucks on some killer packages that they've put together for their video doorbell and floodlight cam. These things are awesome. We'll talk more about that in a minute. And also, molecule with a K, M-O-L-E-K-U-L-E. This air purifier is simply put freaking amazing. And coupon code MGG, save you seventy five bucks. So we'll talk more about that later, too, here in Durham, New Hampshire, with evidently Peter Brady helping me crack my voice. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fearful, Connecticut. John F. Brant. How are you doing, Mr. Brant of Brant? I'm just recovering from the latest North Easter. It shows 700. So I figured we can't do this without. Oh, here in another part of Durham, New Hampshire. Pilot Pete, thanks for having me. Yeah, show 700. That's pretty cool. And North Easter, boy, was that fun or what? They said eight to 12 inches in our area. I think what they meant was to put eight plus 12 inches. We got a lot. We got slammered. Yeah, 20, 22 inches of heavy. Wet snow. Yeah. Oh, and my snowblower is broke. So that's all my hand. Oh, oh, no, no, no. That's not OK. My youngest got some of the deck done and then his back hurt. OK, I get it, pal. Yeah, yeah. I am. So we lost power here. It came back. But we lost power. Actually, we lost it late on Wednesday night, and then it came back for about an hour. Just long enough for me to wake up, go turn all the UPS is on because the UPS is, of course, when the power goes out, the UPS is start beeping. And that's annoying. So it's like, OK, we know it's going to be off for a while. So we just go power mall. Yeah. And then and then the power came back on. I was asleep, Lisa was up. And so she kind of woke, you know, in her like coming back to bed or whatever. She woke me up and I was like, Oh, cool, powers on. Great. So I went around, I turned everything on. And as I was turning the last one on, I'm thinking, you know, we're still due to get like another 10 inches of snow. And it was right at 32 degrees. So this snow was wet and heavy, like Pete said. And I thought, yeah, I am. Is this a fool's errand? Like my doesn't matter because I just turned the last one on. So I go up to bed literally as I'm climbing into bed. I see the clock next to the bed go off. It's like, yeah, here we go. So I just it didn't I went back downstairs. I turned all the UPS is off again, got back into bed, looking at various reports from my routers and like my thing box and things like that. The power actually came back on again throughout the night and then went off. It was off for almost exactly 24 hours for us. But midday yesterday, you know, I got a I got an email that one of our ad agency contacts needed like information for a proposal ASAP. And I was like, oh, well, it's got to deal with that. Yeah, you know, yeah. Yeah, this could be a big big campaign. Like they're in a this new client that they brought on a rush and it's great. It's cool. And it's actually a great client. And you know, that actually we've dealt with before in a different way. So I was like, how quickly do you need it? I called him and he's like, yeah, you know, pretty much ASAP. So I thought, OK, wait a minute, you know, I've got the generator going. I had the generator we have the house and the officer on separate feeds from the street. And so while I was out there like kind of clearing off some of the snow, we let the office run for a little bit just to heat up the hot water pipes. And then we cut it over to the house for the rest of the day so that we'd have like power in the house and we could, you know, do stuff and cook and watch TV or whatever. And so before I cut it over to the house, I thought, you know, the Comcast line often is alive even when we don't have power and sure enough, I powered up instead of just powering up the boiler, which is what I had powered up. I flipped the switches to power the office up and sure enough, within about five minutes, you know, everything had powered up and I watched the cable modem sink up just fine to the Comcast signal. And so I had Wi-Fi in the office and it was like, OK, sweet. So I sat there on the couch in the office with my laptop. I didn't bother turning on the iMac or anything. And I did the, you know, put together the proposal, sent it out to him, all good, great, powered the office down. And then we went out to lunch and then we came back and powered up the house. But, you know, you can you can cobble these things together if you just stop and think like, all right, what tools do I have at my disposal that I can use? And it worked out pretty well. So, you know, all's well that ended well. Yeah. We're usually the first ones to lose it. I was shocked. We didn't. So yeah, our neighborhood here is it's older. You know, it's houses with a bunch of trees in your neighborhood. It's it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the lines are all up on the poles and the lines are all in the poles. Yeah. So you didn't you did not lose power. Is that right, Pete? No, the whole time, not even a flicker. I was shocked. Wow. And John, you didn't lose power? I didn't, but about 25 percent of my town did. I got real lucky. I was going to say that's a lot. I mean, here, 25 percent is like low. But for you, I that from what from what you've told me over the years, it seems like that's a significant amount for your area. Yeah. Well, I think most of it was, you know, trees and wires down. And there's less of those in my area, or at least I actually got the branches trimmed. Sure. Homeowners insurance company at one point. So there's less of a possibility of bad things happening to my house. Like it's interesting that your homeowners insurance would do that. I was going to say your electric company will generally do some level of that. If it's tough, they're doing wires. Yeah, I've actually noticed that, too. Yeah. Well, this was this was over the house. Oh, that's a different power company is doing a trimming program as well. Cool. Some of the tree huggers don't like that. But hey, hey, that's not nice, John. That's not nice. At least in our area, they've done a much better job. So I think that's probably why we didn't lose it. Because in years past, it would be horrible. But yeah, I guess you guys want to talk. Let's move on to the show. Yeah, that's right. OK, so Les actually had a question that we held over from last week. And I am going to apologize. I told that story at the beginning of the show, because it's interesting. But B, the weather for all of us, John, you had some sewer related stuff go on. And so we are underprepped today. I think we've got enough, actually, for the first show. We always are overprepped. So really, I'm probably apologizing and or at least, you know, setting the bar for no reason whatsoever. We do have some great sponsors this week. And I really encourage you to check them out. We'll give you the links and stuff, and we'll tell you more about them. But but these are very cool things. Some of them, both of them have actually changed things in my house dramatically in the last two weeks. So please check out those links. That that's all we ask is that you check out the links for the sponsors. You don't have to buy anything. Obviously, if it's something you want to buy, great. If not, as always, that's just how it works. Our job is to get you to go check out what they're offering. And it's their job to convince you that it's good for you. So all right. With that and thank you for everything. It's show 700. Thank you. Like seriously, all of you. Thank you. A lot of shows. It's a lot of shows. Thank you. I don't know how better to say it than that, that we can sit here, you know, 700 episodes later. What's the anniversary in June? Anniversary is in June, June 13th will be 13 years. 13. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's the 13th. I want to say it's the 13th, but something in my head says the 12th, but I don't think that's right. All right. Anyway, but now on to Les. Les asks asks. Over the years, iTunes has become more and more picky as to what videos it will play and or transfer to the iPhone or iPad. On a recent MGG, I learned of a command to convert videos that were unplayable in iTunes. The problem is that at one time I would get an alert box warning me that certain videos would not transfer transfer to my iDevice because they couldn't be played on it. I would try to convert the videos one at a time to mixed results after much much frustration. I checked the don't show me this again box. Is there a way to undo this? I would like to see which videos were unplayable and try to convert them with the command I learned from the show. So, yeah, it is a per device. It iTunes has a per device memory for this kind of stuff. So you need to plug in your device or at least connect your device. If it's connected Wi-Fi, that's fine. Go to it and then when you're in iTunes, scroll down. So you click on the device that's in now iTunes. It's just like a tiny little device icon in like the top of the iTunes window. But once you're there, scroll down on the main screen of that, scroll down to the options setting on that first screen and you'll see a reset warnings button. It's below the whole like automatically sync with this phone is connected, sync on Wi-Fi where they convert higher bit rate song setting is all that stuff. Right below it is a reset warnings button. And you click that and it will reset for that device on that copy of iTunes. So if you've done this from other machines or whatever, or you've got multiple devices that's more likely you're going to need to do this for each of them. So there you go. That seems like a lot of work. Well, it's iTunes. I mean, you know, remember they've been piling more and more features and cramming it in there. Yeah, just cramming it in. I got an easier solution. What's that? Let's go get a new iPhone. Well, just saying. Would that do it, though? If he inherited his iCloud backup, maybe that wouldn't. I don't know the answer to that. I don't either. But I bet that. But I would put an asterisk on it. That flag is tagged. Yeah, be that way. I don't know. I don't know. I have to start over from new. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm glad I said that as a joke. But now that's something to go. Yeah, for people to think about when they do get a new one. Why is it not working like I want? Let's have a second question, though. And I don't know the answer, but maybe one of you does or John, maybe you do. He says, I edit the metadata of video files in iTunes. Director, nodes, star rating. As I type the information in, I get a list of suggestions, which would be great, except they include every fat fingered mistake I've ever made ever. This gets in the way of words I actually, you know, like to use. Is there a way to edit or start the suggestions fresh? I don't know the answer there. I feel like spotlight would be, you know, kind of at the core of this, but I don't know. So maybe rebuilding the spotlight index would do it. I don't know. I don't know. Thoughts on that, John? I mean, once you manually change the data, you could see what pref file or files have been updated and that may give you a pointer as to where that data is stored. That could be a chore. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Hi, man. You want to take us to Stephen? Yes. We got an update from Stephen. So this one was really bizarre, but I thought I'd share it because Stephen writes, Hi guys, my MacBook Pro early 2011. Wow. We'll not turn on the power cord usually has either a green light or a yellow light. Now I have no light. I tried another power cord with the same results. Does this mean the battery is bad? I've been using the app you talked about on MGG that cycles and checks battery life. It said it was still good. I'm not sure what to do next. Oh, I'm almost certain what it is, Dave. OK. But I was wrong. OK. Well, tell us what you thought it was because it might be what it is for someone else. Yeah. Yes. There is a component within that Mac or anything that uses MagSafe called the MagSafe DCIN board because the thing is with MagSafe, there's actually a little dance that happens between the adapter and the computer where it does a little negotiation. You know, they talk to each other to figure out the capabilities and stuff like that. And if that board's bad, then you won't get a light. Or so I thought. And actually, you can see this information. So I had kind of a brain fart here in that I told him this when he said his machine wouldn't turn on. But the thing is, if the machine did turn on, you could go to system information, hardware, power. And then there should be a listening that says AC charger information. It'll tell you things like it's connected, the ID, the wattage, revision, serial number, all that stuff. So if you think something's wrong with your system, you can look there to see how much power it should be coming out. Fortunately, iFixit does have a little ditty on how to do this repair. And I think we'll link to this. And I pointed him to this. And they also sell the part. Now the thing is the difficulty, from what I recall reading that article, they claim it's a very difficult repair. I'm just looking at the part and looking at it. I mean, it's a very simple part in the grand scheme of things. But just looking at it, it's like, oh dude, to get to where you could unplug and re-plug this thing, probably not easy. Yeah, you'd have to get the whole machine apart. Now the only thing is, so that's a 2011 machine. You know what that means, Dave? And Pete, it's in vintage. I was going to say, so Apple won't work on it. And that's what I said. So I said, Apple is almost certainly not going to do anything for you. But if you find an Apple authorized service provider, they may work on it. That's good to remember. Yeah. So that was my closing advice there. And then he got back to us, and here's the weird part. So he says, a follow-up on my problem. I took my MacBook Pro to an Apple authorized service provider, the Mac guys in Costa Mesa, California. And they found my system software, Hi Sierra, was corrupt. This most likely was due to low RAM. I've maxed out my RAM, and it's working great. Before I added the RAM, the Mac would take forever to wake up, and now it wakes fast. Huh. It's like, huh? So I'm like, I'm glad they solved your problem, but based on the initial email, I would have never guessed that it was a system software problem. So the machine wouldn't charge. It wouldn't even turn on, and somehow that was system software? That's what he said they said. So how did they get it to turn on, though? I realized I might be asking a question to which we don't have the answer, but. My guess would be that they probably put in a charged battery, and we're able to start up the machine, and then it got into a state where it was OK again. OK, that I will believe. Yes, something needed to happen to the hardware. Either there's some magic reset, like a SMC reset kind of thing, although it sounds like that sort of already happened by default here. Or remember, and I don't, Max don't have this anymore, but there used to be a CUDA button, CUDA on the motherboard of all the, I think it was all PowerPC Max is what it was. And that was like the magic button. And if, you know, I remember the first time I found that, I had a client who, like, things just didn't work. And it was like, I was looking around inside. I'm like, I wonder what this red button is. And I even turned to the client. I was like, well, I'm going to push this button because nothing else is working. They're like, yeah, cool, go and pushed it. And it was like, all good. Yeah, so. So yeah, an SMC reset would do it, maybe. So yeah, interesting. I mean, it could have been because the age of that machine, it could have been that the battery was, batteries can get into what I think they call a deep discharge state or something like this could happen. So maybe the strategy, I'm guessing what they did is they jumpstarted the battery or gave it a little boost. And then they determined that the system software was bad. So I think it was a combination of hardware and software. That's interesting. Sounds like those guys, they got it down, man. You got it down? They fixed it. That's great. Cool. On the troubleshooting front, we heard from listener David who shares a tip. And if I can find it, there it is. He says, one other troubleshooting task I've used in he was we were talking about he's this is in reply to in show 699. And we were talking about that weird thing where Safari was causing or Safari was launching on unmounts and that sort of thing. He said, one other troubleshooting task I've used when I get these oddities is to log out of my main user account and log back in using an admin or a test account. This lets me figure out if it's a systemic setting or a user specific setting that's giving me a better idea then of where to go and look for what the problem is. Especially for that problem, that is exactly the right thing to do. It can save you so much time. If you don't have a test user account set up, in that case or in that instance, it would have been easy to set one up and then go use it. That said, sometimes the issue is that you can't even log into your account. So having a test user account set up ahead of time is my recommendation. It's what I do on all of my machines. And then that way it's just there. And if I need it, and if I wind up using it where I make significant enough changes and I just sort of go with my gut on what enough is, then I'll wipe it out and create a new one after I'm done. But otherwise, if I go in and I just do one or two things or whatever, I'll leave it. If I feel like it's pristine enough, then I just leave it for the next time that I need to do it. Along those lines, though, we got an email from Don who shared a tale of woe that is very interestingly related. He says he's got a late 2015, 27 inch iMac running high Sierra. And he's got a 1 terabyte SSD running APFS with 32 gigs of RAM. And he says he runs this 24-7 because he uses it as a Plex server. He says, beginning a couple of months ago, I started to have a problem with the iMac after it had run all night. It has been my habit to run the system maintenance application Cocktail's Daily Maintenance Script first thing in the morning. Cocktail would launch. But when I tried to have it run what it calls essential system maintenance, Cocktail would crash and immediately relaunch. The only way to cure this behavior was to reboot the iMac. And then Cocktail would work as expected. This behavior occurred only after the machine was left running overnight. Cocktail problem occurred consistently. Another issue began to occur, albeit inconsistently, was that the desktop icons of the mounted external hard drives would disappear. Also from time to time, when I tried to open a folder, alias on my desktop, I would get an error message that the alias couldn't find the target folder. Force-quitting Finder would solve both the missing desktop hard drive icons and broken aliases. I took all kinds of steps that did not solve the problem. First, I completely removed and reinstalled the application Cocktail. I have rebooted the Mac into Safe Mode and then restarted into Normal Mode. I ran Disk Utilities First Aid on both the system hard drive or on the system hard drive from the recovery partition. I ran it Apple's Hardware Diagnostic Tests. I reinstalled Mac OS from the recovery partition, spent a couple hours on the phone with Apple support. All of those, no joy. The steps that I took that did solve the problem. I created a new administrative user that I called sysadmin or, you know, test user, it doesn't matter what you call it. And he says, and when I logged into the new account before going to bed, Cocktail ran fine under this new user first thing in the morning. In addition, there were never any finder wonkiness happening while logged into this new user account. That was my clue that one or more of the programs that launched on startup and ran in the background was at fault. Therefore, I removed one program per day from the list of programs that start on launch on startup. And he went into System Preferences User Groups and then would remove one and then let it run overnight. I did this daily until I removed Drive Genius from the launch on login group, bingo. Note that I was running the latest version of Drive Genius, that was the solution. Removing Drive Genius solved the problem that I had with Cocktail and the finder wonkiness. He says, I haven't yet written to ProSoft to let them know of the problem I had, but I will do so soon. He says, I've used Drive Genius for several years and have always found it very helpful. He says, I'd be very sorry if it proved to be a problem under High Sierra going forward. So he says he is running it on his 13-inch MacBook Pro with High Sierra with no issues and certainly none of these. But that is like, so super kudos to you, Don, for taking the long view of this and not only testing it with that other user account because that confirmed for you that it was something in your user account. I know you had already put a ton of time in, but that saved you even more time because you were no longer guessing. You knew it wasn't your computer, it was just that user account. And then systematically one at a time and for you one per day because it was per day that you could test this once per day, patience paid off, man. I like you, I hope Drive Genius isn't actually the issue in that it was, you know, or isn't a long-term issue for you, but yeah, that's really good stuff, man. Like, thanks for sharing that. I like it. What do you think, John? I don't know what to think anymore. No? No, good story. I think he's lucky that D is close to the front of the alphabet. It's been many more days. That's true. I mean, it's just. Yeah, right. That's how that, yeah, you just kind of, you know, when I'm in a scenario like that, I do trust my gut. Sure. In terms of which one I disable first. And sometimes- Yeah, but you know that, as you know, that can also lead you astray because who would think, you know, a program is subtly written as Drive Genius. Sure. Yep. No, it's true. But yeah, that might have made Drive Genius fall to the bottom of the list. I'll trust my gut, though, especially for the first couple, just because you got to start somewhere and you might as well start there. If there's a lot of things to turn off, and this is more reminiscent of my time troubleshooting Windows than the Mac, but the same principle applies. If there's a lot of things, I'll disable them in batches. So if there's 100 things, let's say, I'll disable and test in batches of 10. And then that way, I know, okay, all right, it was batch three. So now I just need to narrow down amongst those 10 as opposed to, you know, one per day in 99 days. Is there a way to fool the computer to thinking that a day is passed so you could do this? You know, that's where I feel like your gut might hurt you. It's really overkill. Well, yeah, because is it truly, like, is the trigger for this, the clock being more forward, or is it time related and has nothing to do with where the computer's clock is, but you know, that some app ran for a while and bloated up and ran, you know. Clock cycles have gone by. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know, you know. I don't know, I don't know. Cool stuff, right? If you solved it, why am I trying to help solve it? No, no, this is what we do on this show. It's all about the troubleshooting. You know, here we are, we're at like the 26 minute mark, now I'm worried we're not going to fit everything in to this episode that I was worried we didn't have enough. Oh, we're quiet now. That's OK. Hey, I had, I did have a thing yesterday, though. My son had a problem with his iPhone, John, and it started, this is, I believe, the model, it's an iPhone 7, it's actually my hand-me-down iPhone 7. I believe the model is A1660, and I think this particular issue that he had is specific to that model. It's an AT&T iPhone 7. So the issue started with him getting no service. And, you know, he would remove his SIM card and put it back in, restart the iPhone, and it was fine. And then, sort of unrelated to that, he decided that he had so many apps on his phone that he'll really only use like seven of them now. And he decided, you know, I'm just going to wipe my phone and start from scratch, not restore from a backup. And, you know, instead of going through and trying to delete all these apps, I'm like, OK, fine. So he did that, and his phone wouldn't, like he did just an erase, you know, on the phone, the reset all programs and settings or whatever. And it wouldn't come back from that. It wouldn't install. So then he tried it with iTunes. This was all unbeknownst to me. Yeah, then he came to me, I don't know, a week ago or whatever, and was like, OK, hey, you got a minute. I need your help. Like, sure. And so he tells me all this, and I was like, oh, yeah, that's not good. And it would get halfway through the restore process and then stop with error number three. Like, OK, crap. So I tried it on my computer, both with iTunes and then I'mazing, just to see if I could get any error messages that meant anything. No. So I booked an appointment with the Genius Bar. And then I posted on Facebook about it in our MacGeek app group at macgeekapp.com slash Facebook. And one of the guys, Dan Deering, who is the manager at MacEdge, our local Apple authorized service provider, he said, yeah, that if it's this model iPhone, that is a known issue. And sure enough, it was. So we went to the Genius Bar yesterday, and they actually didn't swap it out as we were hoping they shipped it off. So I could have just taken it to MacEdge to do it. MacEdge was like, well, you have to ship it out. It's like you might be better off going to the Genius Bar. In this case, no, I should have just gone to MacEdge three or four days ago, whatever it was. But anyway, we shipped it off. While we were there, I always keep a spare iPhone around. So we have an old iPhone 6S that was the spare that he's been using, the battery on it's shot. So while we were there, we asked the Genius, hey, can you do a scan on this battery and possibly replace it while we're sitting here? He's like, yeah, sure, no problem. And then he came back around after we kind of did the whole thing for the iPhone 7 that we were sending off. And oh, and by the way, not to bury the lead here, but that particular repair is covered by Apple even for an out-of-warranty iPhone. It was an issue with them like increasing the tolerance on the EE prom that the firmware is written to, presumably to help prevent jailbreaking, but they went a little too far. So not only could jailbreak firmware not be installed, but neither could Apple's firmware. Is that a problem? Yeah, so they think, but you know, they're like, oh yeah, like there was no issue at all. They were like, yep, you're right. It's covered no problem. Like there was no negotiation, it was great. So, but the guy came out and he's like, look, with the snowstorm we're backed up. My manager said, I can't squeeze you in because you don't have a separate appointment for this battery thing. And I'm like, he's like, you know, I'm really sorry. I'm like, no, you know what, I get it. I'm not gonna hold it against you, no problem. He said, but go talk to them at the front and see if maybe they can like get you an appointment and then you're right here. Like, okay, cool. So we go to the front and the woman was great, but she said, look, it's three hours to get another, you know, a walk-in appointment. But she said, do you have the Apple support app? And I said, yeah, I think so. She's like, okay, well, launch it on the, she said, I can book you an appointment on the phone. You can do this whole thing on the phone and do your battery replacement by mail, which with this particular phone is fine because it's a spare one, especially once the other one comes back. She's like, so do it, you know, you can either call them in the app or you can even chat with them in the app. And she said, they can do the whole diagnostic right there in the app. And you don't have to, yeah. And I, Pete just had this look on his face like, really? Yeah. So I told Lucas, I'm like, okay, while we're on the wifi here at the Apple store, download the app onto that phone, I'll drive us home. It was about a 45 minute ride home while you go in the app and do your thing. So he did, he started a support request inside the app. He chose to chat with him, but he could have done a phone request. The chat turned out to be great. He got a guy, he actually told the guy everything that was going on, including the fact that we were at the store with a different iPhone. The guy was able to kind of keep all these separate thoughts in his head. He knew that this was a spare phone that we needed to use right now. But he said, you know, he went back and forth with him. Okay, yep. He said, let's run a diagnostic on your phone. He said, can you go to the private, do you know how to go to the privacy settings? And Lucas was like, yeah, and he goes to the privacy settings and he launches the screen and then on the screen, like right after it comes up, a new entry appears that said, start diagnostics for Apple support. And it says, Apple support has requested to do diagnostics of this. Will you allow it? And so of course he started it and it ran a diagnostic. And well, you know, once it finished, Jeff, who was the support rep came back in the chat and was like, yep, it looks like your battery is consumed on this device. That was the, that's the term they used consumed, not dead, not, you know, consumed. So, so he's like, we have three options. You can bring it to a genius bar, you can mail it in, you can bring it to Best Buy or whatever or an authorized Apple provider. Lucas was like, well, I'll just, we'll just mail it in. We're going to have a box from the other one that's coming back. The guy's like, great, you got to turn off, find my iPhone for me to set this up. But he's like, but then turn it back on until you get your other phone back, then turn find my, find my iPhone off again. But this whole remote support thing was great. I mean, yeah, like they could do the whole thing. And it wasn't, I mean, we weren't even on a wifi connection. We were driving down the highway at 65 miles an hour. Well, Lucas did this whole support thing. And before we got home, it was finished and he got a link in his email. Now the link in the email was just a pay for the support request and then we go drop it off at UPS. But the payment was $35.95. So I haven't gone to pay for it yet. They say, don't pay for it until you get your other phone back because that way it starts the time around when you've got to ship it and all that. But I'm guessing there's a $6 shipping fee that we are paying in addition to the $29 battery fee. But super easy. And for anybody that's having trouble getting an appointment or doesn't want to have to drive back and forth to their Apple store or their Genius Bar or whatever, that's really awesome. That is great to know about. They can diagnose this stuff from remote. Did you know about that, John? It doesn't sound right. When I had, yes, on a Mac though. On a Mac, yeah, I've seen him do it on the Mac but I've never seen him do it on Iowa. I just didn't know, yeah. Well, I think there's an entry in system info where it, I think it was there but they said, oh yeah, and go to this place in system info. On the Mac. And I think you can say yes. Yeah, okay. And I think you can submit, you know, a system summary. Sure. Yeah, yeah. To Apple. Yes, actually I'm looking right now. So system information, file menu, send to Apple. Yep. So sometimes they'll, They'll take over your screen. I've had them do that on my Mac. I've had them completely take over the screen. Yeah. Yeah, yep. But yeah, I had no idea that this was possible with iOS. And it's, you know, of course, a free app from the App Store. But I recommend everybody put this app on your iPhone. I certainly put it on mine and I mean, it hasn't caused any problems. In fact, in this case, solved one. But yeah, having that right there, no matter where you are, as long as you've got the internet. Right. That's awesome. It's awesome. Yeah. My, the repair that I had recently where I had the screen replaced before I upgraded my phone. Yeah. I made a genius bar appointment and then I ran the my support, the support app. And it's like, oh yeah, by the way, just thought you'd like to know that you have a support. Oh, yeah, it knows about your appointment too. Oh yeah, the Apple Store app. I didn't have the support app on my iPhone, but I had, I was the one that booked the appointment. So when we got within range of the Apple Store in the mall, of course it popped up and it's like, hey, go see a person. You have an appointment. Like yeah, cool. Thanks. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. How do it know? How do it know? It's crazy. It's crazy. We've got some cool stuff found to do. Let's do it, John. Shall we? Do we have it in us? I think we do. We will start with Bruce. Bruce says, given all the recent discussions about the limitations of APFS, here's a cool stuff found bound to make John happy. And John, the folks at Paragon Software have made, they're the ones that made the thing where we could talk to NTFS volumes, right? They made the APFS Retrofit Kit for macOS. And this is free, at least at the moment. I think it'll stay there. And it will run on 10.10 through 10.12, which is Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra. And it adds read-only support for APFS volumes to all of those things. So if you have gone through the process like you have, John, where you have external drives that are APFS, or you have to take a drive out of a dead mac and mount it in something that's not running high, Sierra, Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra, read-only access to your APFS volume for free, which is very cool, if you ask me. I wish Apple would do that. But it doesn't have to, right? You just download it for free. Good to go. Pretty good, right? Where do I know? Yeah, they also make some NTFS. That's what I just said. Yeah, they make the NTFS stuff, yeah. You must have been prepping something else. Yes. Okay, that's okay. No problem. Nice, yeah. Yeah, all right. You with me on this? Cause I got some cool ones to talk about. Oh, yeah, yeah. I've been testing out this thing called the MyScript Calculator 2. This is for iOS. You can use your finger to draw calculations on the screen, and then it turns them into numbers and they work. And you can do some pretty crazy stuff with this. You know, division, like complex equations you can edit. Like as you're typing, it kind of turns them into real numbers, or as you're scratching, it turns them into real numbers. But if you made a mistake, you can like cross it out on the real number that it turned it into and write in your replacement or whatever, it's pretty cool. And you can do linked equations where it all just works together. It's really, really cool. So, you know, MyScript, the folks that do all that stuff. So now, Calculator 2. The Kiwi Graham in the chat room says he thinks they do a handwriting iOS keyboard. They do. They're the ones that did that handwriting iOS keyboard. Yep, and so now they've built a calculator app that's like purpose built with this stuff. Sweet. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good. Pretty good, John. I know you're a Calculator guy like me, so I thought you might like it. Yeah, or a math guy. I remember working with a guy who used MathCAD, which I think is similar to you, but it doesn't know what CR is, stuff. Right, right, right, yeah. Cool, let's see, where are we here? We have from listener Larry. Sorry. I was jumping ahead of ourselves here. Listener Larry says, Watcher, W-A-A-T-C-H-E-R dot com. He says, Amazon is constantly changing prices based on inventory and interest, et cetera. Watcher with two A's continually watches prices and alerts you when there is a change. You can indicate an item you want and every time the price drops, you'll get an email. He says, as a note, I've received as many as 20 price change alerts in one day for a single item. You can also indicate your desired price and set it and forget it. Then when Watcher encounters the price, it places the order for you. The creator is making money with referral links, so he's like, make sure that if you use this service, click his links to support the app. So he says you can also use it in conjunction with your price match credit cards on stuff you've already bought and when you get the alerts, submit it to your credit card company and get your money back. He says you could just use it to find a cheaper price to match for, buy it at Best Buy and track it at Watcher. When a cheaper price alert comes in, boom, get your money back from Best Buy too. He says, personally, I've saved some serious coin. So thanks, Larry. That's a good one. I had no idea. Pretty good, right, John? Yeah. Yeah, cool. Hey, lawyer Jeff chimed in with something, actually, we ran a piece on it at Mac Observer about a week ago, but Troy Hunt launched this website called Pwned Passwords, P-W-N-E-D. For those of you not up on Leedspeak, Lingo. Leedspeak, Lingo. But what it does is it checks to see if your passwords have been leaked on the internet and they have more than 500 million passwords in the database. And so even if you think you have a one-time use, or not a one-time use, but a unique password for a website, it's possible that it's been leaked. And so you'd want to change it. Well, if you use the one password service, then you can, it will automatically check all of your passwords against that database and tell you which ones, if any, have been leaked. So that's a good one. Look at that. Monkey's been pwned. Can you believe it? Monkey? What? Dude, how did you know my password, Pete? Sorry, man. I didn't mean to. It's been pwned. Not the one. I'm gonna leak it out on you, man. The URL for Watcher to answer John Lenthicom in the chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream is Watcher with two A's, W-A-A-T-C-H-E-R. Very, very cool. I've had the opportunity. Go ahead, John. What's that? Did you mention? Sorry, again, I'm distracted here. Yeah, focus on this stuff because it's good for us to have these back and forth. Yeah. Have I been pwned.com? No. I've signed up for that once. No, yeah, I did that a long time ago, yeah. It checks your email address. Yeah, so you give it your email and then, yeah, so it sounds like a similar service to them, so check that one out. Have I been pwned.com? Huh, cool. I'll put that in the list. Yeah. Huh, all right, cool. I've been playing late, you know, I know you're a Tivo guy like me, John, and lots of our listeners are Tivo folks because, you know, they make life way easier. I've been checking out the new Tivo Vox remotes lately. These things are pretty cool. It's a Tivo remote, but it has a microphone in it. And you can pair it up with your Tivo. I think it's gotta be a Bolt or a Romeo or a Tivo Mini. And there's different models that you get if you've got a Romeo or a Mini because you have to get the little receiver for it. But you can, it's like supernatural language stuff, much better than I've experienced with voice assistants in general, but it is very specific, you know, because it's the Tivo and so it knows what kinds of things you might be asking it about. But you can do cool stuff like, hey, you know, you just push a button on the remote and you say, show me all, you know, Chevy Chase movies and then say from the 80s and, you know, or only vacation. And it just starts linking it together, but it like jumps you right around and jumps you right to what you want. And it will even build, like I said, show me Patriots games, right? And it brought me to a screen for Patriots football games that I didn't have never seen before. And then let me create a one pass that seemed way more intelligent than any one pass I've ever been able to create before. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. And they're, you know, it's like 40 bucks or whatever at Amazon, you can get one of these remotes. So it's pretty, pretty interesting. I didn't think we would, like when they said, you know, when they showed it to me at CES, they're like, oh, we'll send you some to test out. It's like, yeah, wow. Like we use it way more than I thought we would, but because it's sort of natural to just, you know, this is what I want to watch. Yeah, no, that's cool. That's amazing where AI is going. I know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty good. You got one, any questions on that or thoughts on that, John, before you move on? Nope. Okay, cool. You want to take us to the next one, John? Yes. So I went through some of the goodies that I've gotten at recent shows here. I finally took some time to do that. It's a tough life, you know? Yeah. But here's what I think is a unique product. It's called the Halo GoDrive Pro. Okay. And so what it is, is it's a lightning cable. So it has the lightning plug on one end, which you plug into your iDevice. Sure. And it is a USB connector. But here's the clever part. Inside the USB connector, you put a micro SD card. Okay. And what can you do with it? So you can do a whole bunch of things. So it'll, like some similar bridge products like a SanDisk, you know, we've mentioned, that makes some of these as well, which has USB on it. And it performs a similar function, but I think it's unique enough. So it can do backup of your photo and video from your device to the SD card. It'll show you your photos in a timeline. You can even snap things from your camera directly to the SD card. That's kind of neat. That is cool. So it, yeah. You can play music and videos. You can share the devices on it. I had a little trouble with this, but you can share things either from the app to other apps or from other apps to it. Okay. And you can save it within the app. You can save things from within the app itself. And it also of course acts as a charging cable. Oh, no kidding. Three things in one. Yeah, so you listen. That's like the perfect little travel companion. Yeah, that was my thought. Though I kind of, I didn't read the instructions, which my bad here. So the first thing I did is I plugged in my computer and it mounted the SD card as a drive. And then I tried to plug it in to the iDevice and the app didn't recognize it. And I'm like, oh, it must be broken or something like that. The thing is, if you plug it in as a drive, that's the functionality that you get. If you plug it into the phone and the USB is not plugged into anything, then the app can talk to it. Right, okay. All right, yeah, of course, that makes sense. That makes sense, yeah. That was my little fumble. But pretty handy, they're in the UK. I got it at, yeah, recent show. It's £19.99, but you can get it and you have to pay for shipping, which I don't think you wanna do from the UK. So is it not available in the US yet? Oh, no, they have it in Amazon. Oh, oh, okay. I'm gonna provide a link. I have it in my notepad here. There's a link on Amazon. All right, so 24.99. And you provide your own microSD, I think they say up to 512 gigs. Yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's a... Cool. So. Cool, cool. That's number one. All right, cool. Hey, before we move on, and because these things are cool stuff out, and it's not even that we're moving on, we're just staying with cool stuff out, I want to talk about both of our sponsors today, John, if that works for you. Absolutely. All right, our first sponsor today certainly falls into the category of cool stuff found, and that is Ring. I've known about Ring for a little while because I knew that they made this video doorbell, but I'd never tried one until recently. So I've tried not only their video doorbell, but also their video floodlight camera. The idea behind this is pretty simple. You've got these devices on the outside of your house, they can track motion, they can see what's going on, and they can provide two-way communication. So from my iPhone, I can see who's at my door or who's in my driveway because I have a floodlight cam aimed that way at any time, right? No matter where I am or what I'm doing, I can go and activate these cameras and see them. But if there's motion, and it's cool because you can go in the app and set these things, I can get an alert that there's motion, and then I can go see these things. Like I said, it's a one-way camera, I'm the only one that can see, but it's a two-way audio device. So I can talk to these people and hear them whoever's there in my driveway. Let me play a clip that they sent us from one of the things here. Hey, sorry, we're in the middle of dinner. Can I help you? Yes, how are you? Good, how are you? Good, I haven't seen you in a while. I don't know who you are. I'm Justin. I don't know you, Justin. I met you a long time ago when I was younger. No, I'm sorry, you're in the wrong place. Much love in God bless. Yeah, so I don't know if that guy was like a crook or just truly in the wrong place, but either way, right, it doesn't matter. She didn't have to open the door. She didn't even have to be home, right? And that's the cool part. Like in our house, our living room is kind of on the, like our driveway is on the south side of the house. It's like our house is sort of sideways to the driveway. So the driveway's on the side of the house. Our living room's on the north side of the house. If we're expecting someone, or especially if we're not, we can't really sit in the living room and monitor what's going on in the driveway. Well now with Ring, we don't even have to. We certainly can. We could have our phone or our iPad, you know, up showing the live view of the driveway, but we can also get a notification that says, hey, there's somebody in your driveway. And you sort of like, it's cool. Once you set up the camera, you draw these things. Like I said, and it hit like on the picture, and you can choose where in the camera's field of view triggers a motion event. And then we can just look and it's like, oh, hey, you know, I can say to one of my kids, like your ride's here or whatever. It's really, really cool stuff. And I can save you some money. So you can save up to 150 bucks on a Ring of Security Kit at ring.com slash mgg. Again, that's ring.com slash mgg. Save 150 bucks when you go to ring.com slash mgg. You gotta check this out. This is the coolest new gadget that I've used in a while. In fact, my wife says, this is the best gadget that I've ever brought into the house. So check it out. Ring.com slash mgg. Our thanks to Ring for sponsoring this episode. Our second sponsor for today is also a new sponsor and also falls into the category of cool stuff found. It's Molecule. We're at M-O-L-E-K-U-L-E.com. You can get this really awesome air purifier. I like, my wife has had allergies. We all suffer from allergies, right? We lived in Austin, Texas, which is like the allergy capital of the world and it kind of lingers with you after that. Once you start suffering, it never goes away. Well, the Molecule folks didn't like the fact that we had this really old 70-year-old technology on HEPA filters that was the best thing we could use for clearing allergens out of our home because our indoor air is way more filled with this crap than the outdoor air generally is. I mean, unless you live next door to some like pollutant factory or something. But generally speaking, your indoor air is what really needs to be purified. And so they developed this thing that they call, it is called photo electrochemical oxidation. And what it does is it not only traps these things that are a thousand times smaller than a HEPA filter can, but it also then kills them off, right? So a HEPA filter just traps them, but it's still right there. This actually kills them off. And they say one customer said she was able to breathe through her nose for the first time in 15 years. We set this thing up and I can attest to this. We set it up and we put it in our bedroom to begin with. We've tried it in different rooms of the house and it's really actually made a huge difference everywhere we've put it. I walked into the bedroom maybe 20 minutes after this thing started and it was still in what it called its initial processing mode or whatever. Dude, this thing, like the air in that room, I've never experienced this before in my house. I could feel it like in my nasal cavity. It was just like, oh, this air is clean, so good. And it's super easy to set up. It's even got an app where you connect it to your wifi and then you can check the status of the filters. They'll automatically send you filters as the thing knows and it can talk back to the mother ship of molecule or whatever and you can save 75 bucks. So again, go to molecule, M-O-L-E-K-U-L-E dot com and check out and to promo code M-G-G. This thing truly has been life changing inside our house. It's really, really quite something and you gotta check it out. Again, molecule M-O-L-E-K-U-L-E dot com promo code. Easy for me to say. M-G-G will get you 75 bucks off of this really killer, super simple to use, air filter, air purifier. It really is, I mean, it's all of that and it really destroys all the pollutants in your air. Check it out. Our thanks to Molecule with a K for sponsoring this episode. Up next. So this is something I actually spent my own coin on. Wasn't a lot of coin, but it looks like it has a lot of features for what I paid, Dave. It's the iClever 10,000 milliamp hour portable solar power bank. Huh. So, obviously it's 10,000 milliamp hour. Yeah. It's about the size of maybe two iPhones stacked on top of one another. So it's 10,000 milliamp hours. You can charge it either through USB and it has two USB ports, one regular power, one high power. And it also has a solar cell. So if you wanna, it's not gonna charge as fast with the solar cells as through USB, but you know, you're out in the sun and you wanna top it off. It's good for that. The lights will blink if it gets enough solar energy. Okay. It also has a flashlight. And they also claim it is, I forget the specification, water resistant. Let's call it. Okay. Proof. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. It probably is, but you know, a lot of these things. I think they gave the rating. They say it's IP, whatever it is. Huh. But there you go. And quickly the deal thing. So the thing is the original, I think I got it on thrifter and it was $19.99 I paid on Amazon. And then I found through this other plug in, Dave. The honey one, it's down to $17.99. Oh, nice. Yeah, we talked about honey before. We did, yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes. And they also have, from what I saw, they kind of integrate with Amazon and they'll say, oh yeah, if you want an alert on this. Right. So they also do the price tracking, which is kind of cool. But I think it's a great travel battery pack. Cool. Hey, kind of along the same lines, I have been checking out this thing from my charge called the adventure jump start. So it too is a battery pack. Now, as a battery pack, it's 6,600 milliamp hours, right? So plenty to recharge your iPhone a couple of times, maybe even three times enough to top off your iPad. But the unique feature of this one is that the amperage that it can put out blows away any other battery pack. It can do a 400 amp peak jump start current and a 200 amp jump start current. And it comes with jumper cables to connect to your car. So you keep this thing in your car, you keep it charged up and when you need a jump, you give it to yourself right then and there. You just connect it up to the terminals on your battery or whatever you're supposed to do in your car and that might be different. But that you just connect it up, connect it to the my charge adventure jump start thing and boom, start your car, you're up and running. Which I think is pretty cool. You know, I now have these in our cars because in the winter, especially when we get those single digit temperatures, you leave your car for too long, you might wind up with a battery issue, so. I don't know. Absolutely, over it gets. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yep. Some serious energy in those things. No wonder they don't want them in the building. That's tiny. That's tiny. I have one of these huge monsters. I got one of these huge monstrous ones that weighs like probably like, you know, 10 or 15. Oh, no, this thing's not much bigger than like your iPhone in that sense. Yeah, I know. It's pretty cool. Yep. And it's a hundred bucks, at least on their site, it's a hundred bucks. Maybe it's, maybe you can get it cheap on Amazon to check one of the various things that we've talked about to find that. The iPhone 10, you know, is, it's got like a interesting curve and all that to the surface. So I've been checking out the invisible invisible shield glass and Lux 360 from Zag. This thing is so cool. It's it's actually a two part tempered glass shield, one that goes on the front and one that goes on the back. And it works really, it like feels good. It goes on super easy. They have like a little kit that that helps you get it totally perfectly lined up, which is really the hard thing when you're doing the glass, because you don't want to have to take it off and put it back on because then you risk dust kind of getting vacuum sucked in there when you when you peel it back up. So yeah, pretty good stuff. So that's I put one of those on my iPhone 10 and it I forget that it's on there. It just it looks normal. It actually has a colored bezel. It's a black bezel on the one that I have. But I don't I don't notice it because it's black against the iPhone's black and just feels good, works with a case. It's great. So I like it. Good. Yeah, John. Cool. A couple more cool stuffs found to to add. We've long been fans of Edimotic's headphones here. I think when we started doing the show, at least at least you and maybe even me were using their old ear sixes on the the for, you know, for your monitoring while we were doing the show. Well, they've come out with new a new set of headphones and these are the ear fours. And these things are it's cool. They I'm trying to pull it up here. They have it on their website and I pulled up the wrong thing. And now I'm all confused. But I'll get there. So there's two models. There's the reference or studio response. And then there's the extended response of these ear fours. And I asked him to send me the studio response because the studio reference because I I tend not to like too much low end in in my sound, they accidentally sent me the extended response ones with which they say have more low end. And I actually think they sound great. Like they whatever they've done to the extended response really fills it out without it sounding, you know, it doesn't have it doesn't sound like those Beats headphones. Right. Really nice sound. My guess is the studio reference would sound more like a studio reference monitor, which is more flat response and maybe not quite as musical. I don't know. I haven't tested them, but that would be my guess. But but these extended response ones sound they just sound great. They're super comfortable in the ear. They have that triple flanged thing that Edomotic is sort of known for. I don't know if they were the ones that pioneered it. They may well have been. But those triple flanged ear pieces last a long time. Way more than the foam ones do. They really seal and fit in the ear comfortably. So I'm stoked to see Edomotic doing this stuff now. And it's it's always good, always good. One of our one of our favorite brands. And it comes, it does come with the foam ones, if you prefer those and all that stuff. But yeah, we'll put a link to those in the show notes. Good stuff. Thoughts on that, John? You still you're not sixes kicking around. Gee, really? Yeah, those those ear sixes. I mean, you know, that's the thing is they last, right? Well, I like them also because the seal is good enough where actually a lot of times I'll use them when flying, if I remember. Sure. Yeah, that's they're great for that because they're just out of the way and the ear fours are the same way. They're just small and out of the way. But yeah, you put these in when you're flying, you're not going to hear anything around you, which is key. I talked last year right about this time about a 27 inch display that I bought from Monoprice. And then I proceeded to talk about how it didn't want to wake up when the with my Mac, right? I either had to restart my Mac or power cycle the display. There's just some issue with with that particular 27 inch, you know, 4K display from Monoprice. Well, there's a new one, the 27 inch UHD IPS, 4K ultra slim aluminum monitor from Monoprice that I've been using for a couple of months now. And I was hesitant to talk about it until I really had the opportunity to test it for a longer period of time to make sure that it always wakes up. It always wakes up. It knows the Mac. It knows whatever it needs to know. And it, man, it looks great. If your Mac supports retina displays, this will your Mac will then see this as a retina capable display in that way where it'll it'll do higher density for, you know, for just like a retina display does it. It'll your Mac will see it this way. So depending on your Mac's video capabilities, even if your Mac isn't retina capable, it will see this as a retina capable display. But again, depending on how much VRAM you have, it may or may not be able to fully take advantage of it. But man, it just it looks great, always wakes up. I've had it at my desk in my office, like I said, for a couple of months and it, you know, it's just an extension of my Mac now. Really, really nice stuff. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Good stuff. You got one last cool stuff found for us, John. I got one last one, Dave, that I did get at a show. All right. And it's from a company called Biokey, and they call it their Biokey Touchlock. Okay. Well, you can probably guess what mechanism you use in order to open and close it while closing it is easy. But how do you open it? You use your fingerprint. It's like a Touch ID lock. Really? I think that's pretty much. Yeah, that's it, right? Yeah. Pretty much pulled it out of the pack here. So, you know, if you want to program a fingerprint, you hold down the latch part, and then an LED comes on and it says, okay, register your fingerprint. You hold your fingerprint there. And then I use my fingerprint to open it. But you can also use it for family and friends. It'll store up to 20 fingerprints. They have various colors and designs. And you got to charge it, and it has a USB port where you can charge it as well. But I think it lasts a pretty long time. And I looked at this company, these guys make a ton of fingerprint scanning verification products. Mostly it looks like for Windows, but it looks like they've been doing this thing for a long time here, but I thought it was pretty elegant. That's pretty cool, man. Huh. Look at that. Yeah, I saw they had another one like a TSA type one. I was just going to ask if they had a TSA approved version of this, because that would be the next question. Yeah, huh? Yeah, they got that. They got a, yeah, check out the site. You can link to this product and look at some of those other things, but I was able to figure it out within a couple of minutes. Very cool. Very cool. Cool. You know, I want to take a minute, as we always do, and thank our premium subscribers that contributed this week. But really, you know, again, as I said at the beginning of this, you know, 700 episodes, it's all about you. You folks are the, like, we love doing this, but we do it for you. And it's you that really makes us stop and make sure we've got things the best we can for you and put on the best show we possibly can every week. So thank you to all of you. And for this week, specific things out on our biannual plan at 25 bucks every six months, Anthony B, Joe B, Eric R, Drake Z and Terry O. And then on our monthly ten dollar plan, Abdullah B, Paul M, Mike C, Mike Mark R, Dave C, Pierre Timo, Neil L and Frank A. And then a one time contribution to 25 bucks from Mark S. Thank you so much to all of you if you want to learn more about that. Of course, macgeekab.com slash premium if you are interested and able. And if you're not, it's it's OK. Like keep sending in your questions, keep listening. Like I said earlier, you know, when we put sponsors in the show, which we usually have, go check out their stuff. That's that's all we ask if it turns out to be something that's going to be good for you and you want to buy. Awesome. But our job is to get you to check it out and and generate some interest. And so hopefully we're doing that and we really appreciate it when you when you follow through on that stuff. That makes a huge difference for us. So thank you. All right. We think we've got time for a couple of tips and maybe some follow up. So a quick tip that kind of falls into the cool stuff found revisited category, because I think we've talked about this before, is from listener David who shares that if your AirPods are lost, you can use the find my iPhone app to find them. But this only works if they're out of the case because they need to be in a mode where they're wanting to pair with your phone. Otherwise, it doesn't work. And that's change that apple. Yeah. No kidding. Where's my case? Where's where are my AirPods? I've gone a week without using my AirPods because I lose them. So I get I have this catalyst case for the AirPods that I keep them in. And that for some reason, having them in this case, probably because it has this little carabiner thing on it, makes it so that I I don't lose them. But yeah, I don't know. Yeah. So do they have to be in Bluetooth range? Yes. Yeah. Airpods are Bluetooth only. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if they give you last known location. They will. Yeah. Yeah. But that's I mean, these things are tiny. No, I know. You know, it's in your house. My sister's boyfriend lost his right one or one of the two within hours of first getting them. What a bummer. And when you when you play the find my app, it makes a sound out of the AirPods. So they were on a busy New York street and went back and looked for it. And it was gone. It was a bummer. That's a bummer. But yeah, no, that's I've actually managed to use that to find it in the cushion. It fell out of my pocket and down into that one. Make sure it's not in your ear when you do this because the sound is loud. Yeah. Cool. Thanks, David. Thanks for the reminder on that. And then from Brother Jay, we were having a crazy conversation via email about all kinds of like firewalls. And and he wants to do some things where he routes traffic only from his Plex server to a VPN, but not other things. And so or not not, he wants to route his Plex server not through VPN so he can access it from the outside, but he wants to do other things. And Apple's firewall uses that there's all kind of course it's Unix based the there are several different Unix common Unix utilities that are the basis or the foundation of most firewalls. Those are things like IP tables, IPFW or IP chains. Apple doesn't use any of those. Apple uses something called P F and then there is a command line control called P F C T L that I've never used to manage a firewall, but certainly you could. Brother Jay, he reminds me and reminds us of something we have mentioned before and cool stuff found called Mura's M U R U S at Mura's firewall dot com that is a graphical interface to P F P F stands for packet filter, as I'm told. So you can do a lot of things. I'm sure there's some things that P F will do that Mura's hasn't built into the the graphical app, but it doesn't look like that list is all that long. This seems pretty full featured and you get to do it all graphically. So go ahead and check out Mura's firewall. If you if you're if you're of that ilk. So thanks for the reminder, Brother Jay. Good stuff. All right. Two things from Robin and one or sorry, two things from Simon and one from Robin following up from the last show. Episode six ninety nine, Robin writes us and says we were talking about chi chargers in the last show. And Robin says I've enjoyed that that segment. I also bought several of them. And one thing I've noticed is that when my iPhone 10 is completely drained, it cannot be charged by chi. It only works when I first connect via the cable to give it an initial load to the iPhone. Did you experience the same? I do remember this. I this happened only once for me. But yeah, I wasn't able to get it to to kind of pair with the chi coil when it was dead. I don't know if that's how it's supposed to be, but it certainly I guess it makes sense if there's a truly a pairing thing, although the Apple Watch will pair when dead with with its wireless charging thing, which as we said last week is kind of sort of chi, but not really. So have you have you had a dead phone yet, John, and tried to revive it with a chi charge? Um, no. OK. OK. No, I have run it all the way down. Sure. But then, yeah, I plugged in it. I haven't tried that yet. I'll have to see if see what the how the seven reacts or the eight reacts. I was just going to say, you don't have an eight. Yeah, you don't have a seven. You have an eight. Yeah. Simon wrote in again regarding chi. We were talking about putting it on your bedside table and finding something that didn't have a bright light shining all night. And he found at Ikea of all places, the Rollin, that's a R-A-L-L-E-N with an umlaut over the A. So almost in Spinal Tap World here with the way these things look. But anyway, the Rollin is a chi charger that has a its shape is it's almost conical. In a sense. And it says that you use a fix a hole. So if I XA, you could just lay this thing on your on your desk or your bedside table. But you can also drill a hole that this thing will just drop into. And then it lies flush and flat with your either desktop or bedside table. And Simon says that the light is he says designed to be installed into a desktop. But I bought it and drilled the hole. It is sunk into the tabletop and looks great, almost invisible. The LED is white and is off when not charging. And it's white when charging. But as this charger is so small, the light is covered by the phone and you can't see it if you have your phone on top of it. But it also does flash if there's a problem. So since I love it and it's hidden well inside my desk. So very cool stuff. We will of course put a link in the show notes to that. I love these kinds of things. You don't have to assemble it yourself, right? No, no, if you want to drill it, that you've got to do on your own. Mama wouldn't be happy if I did that to the bedside table. Right, that's the thing. Yeah, exactly. And then also from Simon from Episode 699, we were talking about email and push notifications and all of that stuff. And it was Simon's question, I believe. But he says I started using an email app called Spark. It's available on both Mac and iOS and it gives me instant notifications similar to push and also allows me to use multiple from addresses. He says it's great and I've decided to use it as my main mail client. Very easy to set up and it syncs settings across multiple platforms. So there you go. We've mentioned Spark on the show before. It's from the folks at Riedel, R-E-A-D-D-L-E but we'll put a link to Spark. I think it's sparkmailapp.com I've tested Spark, it's actually quite good. I have a hard time changing mail apps and that's always like a big commitment but I've been very impressed with Spark as far as third party mail clients go. I think it's the best I've checked out. So yeah, lots of people in the chat room saying the same thing. So it's good, it's good. Any thoughts on that, John? I haven't installed and I get updates for it but I haven't actually used it. You don't use it actively. Got it, got it. Yeah, no problem. Well, despite the fact that in the middle of the show I screwed up the timing and I have no idea where we are on the time I actually do have some idea and it's time, we gotta go. We gotta go. The band somehow knows when to start playing. The music just magically knows. That's right. If there is a podcast, it's totally not safe for anyone ever, anywhere. So bear that in mind. Right, so don't listen to it. But no, it's called the 10 minute podcast and it's three comedians, completely irreverent but they have their theme music always playing but it has a gap of silence and the show is exactly 10 minutes long because the music starts fading in as they're approaching the 10 minute mark and that's it, that's it. It's a hard break, man. It's a hard break, that's it. Yup, so. Yeah, yup. And there's been some episodes where I wish the music hadn't come in and some where it's like, oh, thank goodness. But anyway, yeah, don't listen to it. I can't recommend it at all. Visit us on Facebook, mackeykev.com slash Facebook. Visit us, you can send us email. Feedback at mackeykev.com. No, no, no, no, no, no. Feedback at mackeykev.com. I heard Dave say feedback at mackeykev.com. I don't know what you guys are talking about. I said premium at mackeykev.com for all of the folks that are premium members that can use that address and get faster responses, generally speaking. Or you can call us at 224888geek, which John is. 4335. Find one last place where they can find us, Mr. Braun. Oh my gosh, I guess we have to be Twitter. All right. I am John F. Braun. He is Dave Hamilton. That are the guys pilot Pete. Podcast is mackeykev and the publication is macabserver, follow at twitter.com. Sweet. That's what we got this time. I want to thank, of course, all our sponsors. We've got Ring at ring.com slash mgg. Molecule with a K, with coupon code mgg. Of course, in the podcast marketplace, we've got Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Otherworldscomputing at macsales.com. Barebonessoftware at barebones.com. Our thanks to cashflycsugfly.com. All of that can be found at mackeykev.com slash sponsors, too, at any time. All the deals, we keep them up to date there. That's right. Pete, what do you have to say? Anything? Any lasting advice? All this cool stuff found, all this stuff you're advertising. Oh, man, my wallet. No. Oh, no, wasn't that? Okay. And that's why I love this show, but boy, is it expensive to listen to. Yeah, we know. The cool stuff found in episodes are costly. We're aware of it. Yeah, good stuff, but. For us, too. Yeah. But if you're gonna go out and spend that money, you know, and mama's looking through your wallet later, all I can tell you is don't get caught. Made on a map.