 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, Episode 752 for Monday, March 11th, 2019. Thanks, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, and we mix it all together kind of like granola. You know, it's good for you. It's good tasting. You can have it in the morning. You can have it in the afternoon. You can have it in the evening. And it's just good all the time. And the goal is that we each learn at least five new things every time we get together. You don't have to stop at five. It's just at least five. And, you know, it's a goal. It's part of our system so that routinely we hit the goal. But it doesn't mean we have to all the time. It's fine. The system works. We're here. Thanks for this episode. Include capterra.com.mgg, hairclub.com.mgg, and jamf.com.mgg. Easy for me to say jamf. That's jmf.com.mgg in case I was unclear. We'll talk more about the details behind each of those URLs later. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, at least when we recorded this, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in triple Connecticut, this is John F. Brunn. Good morning, John F. Brunn. Well, it's morning for us. It's actually many days before the 11th because I will be in Austin for South by Southwest while this, when this is released on the 11th. We've opted not to record remotely, at least not this episode. You never know if we'll get a wild hair while I'm there and maybe record something at the end of the week. But probably not, but you never know. But easier to get this one done when we're in the normal studio. I'm looking forward to South by Southwest, John. I went last year, but had skipped a few years and was actually pretty impressed last year with the music festival that they always do a great job with and always have. The interactive festival was fantastic for a while. And then sort of their focus changed and didn't quite fit with us for a few years. And last year I went back and I was really impressed, lots of good stuff. And I'm looking forward to seeing quite a few good things this year. I've already got like notes from people in appointments book to check out some cool tech while I'm there in addition to kind of all the conferences. And South by Southwest is an interesting festival, right? Because it's as much about, in fact, I would say it's more, the interactive part especially is more about the people and the business of it. But, you know, people bring stuff there and they do have an Expo floor and there are cool things on the Expo floor. And, you know, I think it's, I think the Expo floor there is overlooked. So it's always kind of a cool place to go and mine for things. And so I'm looking forward to that and get to do some of that this weekend. And then I've actually got a trip to Houston in the middle and then music festival at the end. So pretty good. Yeah. So yesterday was exciting, Dave. Talk to me, John. You know what? Smart homes are great except when they're not. So Wink looks like they had a meltdown yesterday. And this is yesterday, of course, being no one knows when yesterday is or maybe they can relate it. But yeah, Thursday, the seventh Wink, Wink's cloud service started having connectivity issues, right? Or response issues, I should say. Yeah. I mean, I got a text around 11 o'clock and they, you know, they have a status thing. You can get notifications by email or text or whatever. And I was like, oh, yeah, there's something up. And I'm like, whatever. Then I wasn't really doing anything smart home like throughout the day. But when I did, you know, I walked into my entertainment center and I tell, you know who I usually say lights on and the lights go on. Well, I said it and a couple of seconds, you know who said, yeah, I'm having trouble talking to your thing. Maybe check the power or something. So run upstairs and there's a pulsing blue light, which means help. Yeah. And they, and they're still reporting on their status page. Things are up. Now the good news is that you can still manually control. So what I had to do was, you know, like turn, turn the lights off and back on. And then the bulbs came on. Got it. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Of course. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. This is it. Also they have, you know, buttons to manually. Okay. Yeah. The thing is you can, you know, if you've, I mean, you joke, we joke about the caveman thing. And of course you're right. I mean, you know, Rewind 10 years and that's exactly what we were doing and everything was fine. But if your house now sort of operates and relies on these things, that can be, it can be pretty disruptive when, when you have something that functionally relies on a cloud service and then suddenly does, you know, the cloud services down, you have a problem. We've talked about this with some of our Wi-Fi mesh products, right? Eero, I'm pretty sure Eero still has this problem, although they, they might have fixed it last year. So I don't want to, I don't want to miss speak, but certainly when Eero launched and for, for many, many months and perhaps, you know, year or years after, if your internet connection went down or as is the case that you're experiencing at the moment with Wink, if their cloud service goes down, which is the same as your internet service going down and that your Eero can't talk to the cloud, well, your Wi-Fi would shut off like even internal to your house. So you couldn't, if you were using it, you know, to like print things or stream from your local Plex server or, you know, anything like that, like, or to back up to your time capsule or whatever you use, like that's, that's it, right? There is no Wi-Fi. And Plume did that originally too. And they had it even when their super pods originally came out, but I know that Plume fixed it. And I, I have some, I know there were discussions on the Eero boards about it and I'm pretty sure it's fixed now, but, but it isn't, you know, it is something to consider when you've got functionality that relies on cloud connection when you don't have cloud connection, you don't have that functionality. It's, it's definitely something to be aware of, especially, you know, with Wi-Fi, I mean, that presents the problems we, we discussed, but with like smart home, if your schedule say for your heat going on and off was tied to some cloud service, well, that wouldn't be happening, right? You know, and that's not so good. So yeah, the more we become reliant and the more these things integrate into our lives, like the, yeah, that's, and this has been down for almost 24 hours now, right? Winks thing. Yes. Yeah. Their page says there's still a problem, though a friend of mine out in Arizona, I think that's where he is now, said, I'm not having a problem. So they're saying, you know, scattered problems. I don't know if they're, it's their back end or what, I think they have deeper problems though, because, you know, I was searching for an article, you know, to confirm with the pulsing LED meton. So I searched online and a couple of Wink articles came up in the Google. Yeah. And I click on them and I get a 404. So I think they have deeper problems. Oh, huh. Yeah. The thing is, they're not the only one. So I did a search though. So one thing I did is, you know, just to check out the competing product. Samsung has SmartThings Hub. Right. So I ordered one of those just to check that out. I don't know if I'm going to abandon Wink, but I'd like to check out the competing product. That's great. But I did a search online and they had an event as well. Oh, interesting. Like a year ago. Okay. Yeah. Nobody could do anything. And supposedly Wink says that they can do local control, but I wasn't able to get that. And then, you know, I ran the app and, you know, I touched one of the lights to try to turn it on. And it was like, nope. Huh. Similar thing you said is that, you know, you would think that if it's not connected to the cloud, you could still do local stuff, but it doesn't seem to be the case for a lot of products. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. So. Cool. Well, I'm actually, I'm, I mean, it sucks that you're going through this, but I'm actually really excited that you'll be able to do some A being, because I just in my personal life, I get questions from people, which hub should I get, you know, the Wink or the smart things. And, you know, it's always like, well, I can only go on anecdotal stuff. And anecdotally, it seems like people like the smart things better, but I don't know if that's just because it's more popular. So I'm actually excited about this. So your, your pain is our gain. And that's good thing. Yeah. I mean, it came back like at 11 last night. So I'm, I'm, you know, back in business. Oh, you are. Oh, so it's not offline. Well, well, they still say that they. Oh, I see. Okay. I got it. It's just scattered. It's scattered. Got it. Got it. Cool. All right. Well, we have a, we have all kinds of tips. We have, man, we've got everything. I, I want to take a quick minute though here, John, and talk about our first sponsor. If that's okay by you. Absolutely. All right. We all know how much fun it is to manage our own devices. Right. I mean, let's face it, we enjoy that stuff at some level, but at some level we don't. And when it stops getting fun at all, it was when we have to manage other people's devices. Well, Jamf can change that for you with Jamf now, because Jamf now makes it easy to set up, manage and protect not only your Apple devices, but the devices for all of the folks that work for you and that you have to support the people that you're responsible for in your organization or maybe your clients. 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Now, there's a special URL you have to go to. Go create your free account today at jamf.com.mgg. That's J-A-M-F.com.m-g-g. And take your efficiency back into your own hands. Trust me, you will love this. And it's free to start going and actually free for your first three devices forever. J-A-M-F.com.m-g-g are thanks to Jamf now for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Now, let's go to... Let's go to Stephen. Actually, we've got tons of tips here. So Stephen says... This one's so cool. He says, I know the year is still young, but here is quite possibly the most useless quick tip of the year for you. But it's so cool. In messages on the Macs, or you launch messages on the Mac with the cursor in the text entry field, like where you would type a message to send to someone, you can use option up arrow and or option down arrow to browse through your previously sent messages in that chat. So very similar to what you can do in the terminal with the up arrow, you can see all your previous commands. Now, in the terminal, this is super helpful because if you want to repeat a command or make a small edit to a command that you've previously done, you just go up arrow and either hit return to re... You know, to duplicate that command or then you can just edit and go do it. Super, super handy. I'm not sure why this would matter at all in messages, but kind of a nice little Easter egg. So thanks for sharing that, Stephen. That's pretty cool. I'm trying to figure out why the engineer or engineers that put this in there said, yeah, well, we at least want it for us. There's a lot of things like that that happen and we find them and talk about them here. This one, I'm not sure I know the use case, but it's fun anyway. So there you go. Pretty good, huh, John? Yeah. And speaking of messages, I actually had on my Facebook a friend asked a question. Sure. How do I archive my messages? I'm like, hmm. Archive your iMessages. Yes. I don't know that my answer... I'm curious if there's actually an answer to this. My answer is you don't. So one suggestion I made, it doesn't quite address the issue, but putting your messages in iCloud, speaking of clouds, right, would at least distribute them among all your devices. But I don't think that really answers the question. Right. And I saw this in, I think, my Twitter feed. And I'm going to verify this. So yeah. Amazing. I think maybe the answer. Oh. Oh, that's true. And I'm looking right now. So we can pull your messages. Right. I think you can then take that and I believe you can then save it. Huh. And then the trick would be delete it so that they are truly archived and not just... I mean, amazing. We'll back them up. So at least there's that, right? But yeah. Here we go. Okay. All right. On the bottom of the screen now, it says export to PDF, export to text, and export to CSV. Wow. And export attachments. I like it. So... Huh. Smart. So whatever reason you... Yeah. I guess for sentimental reasons or something like that. Sure. Save certain messages forever. Yeah. Good catch. I like it, man. That's good. Very cool. Cool. All right. Let's see. Going to... Oh man. Patrick sent something in and I'm actually really happy about it. We've been... We talked on and off about finder settings and finder issues and laying out your finder windows and all that stuff. Patrick has a cool stuff found for us that I think is perfect. And he, because he wanted to minimize the width of the sidebar, I think, and he, you know, we were going back and forth and he finally said, aha. Never mind. I decided to start using Extra Finder, X-T-R-A Finder. And with that, for this particular thing, he's able to tell it to maintain a minimum and maximum width that keeps whatever columns it was that he wanted to mess with, wide enough to read, but not too wide. And I think that's the... I think that's the answer for a lot of these, you know, finder tweak things. The issue I'm pretty sure is that you have to turn off system integrity protection, at least to install it and perhaps to run it. You know, I'm not... I did... system integrity protection. I have not run into a scenario personally where it has saved me from something. And of course I've run into several where it's put up walls. So on my machines, like on this one here in the studio, I've turned it off because I like to use SwitchRes 10, SwitchRes X. And in order to get that installed and running, you need to turn off SIP. So I have not... I have not yet regretted that and I don't believe that I will. But thank you, Patrick. Very cool. You still run with SIP, John? Yes. Okay. I haven't had a need. You haven't had a need? Yeah. I wouldn't recommend turning it off just for the sake of turning it off, but as soon as you find a need, yeah, there you go. So... Yes. We did have a question from Bob about tweaking Finder window layout. And if you don't want to use Extra Finder because you don't want to turn off SIP, Bob was having a problem. His sidebar in the Finder wasn't appearing at all. And that was less than desirable for him. So, you know, the Finder's a weird thing. And all I can do is offer some general advice for trying to get the Finder to retain settings. So there are a few things where you actually have control over this in preferences. In the Finder, you can go to View, Show View Options. And also in the Finder menu, Preferences and frankly all four tabs in Finder Preferences can adjust the types of things that you... you know, that... like default location of a new window and layout options and things like that. Those can all be tweaked in a very intentional way there. But in terms of window location and size, this is where the Finder gets a little interesting. It used to be and I believe the instruction still is but correct us if I'm wrong, feedback at MacGeekab podcast. Nope. Why do I say that? It's not MacGeekab podcast. I don't think we even own that domain. Maybe we should. It's feedback at MacGeekab.com, John. Yes. And just to make sure you heard it right, feedback at MacGeekab.com. That's feedback at MacGeekab.com. I said it right. Okay, good. But the way that I have been taught to control the placement and locate and size of Finder windows is to open a new window. Don't change where you are. Don't even click inside the window. Just move the window to where you want it, resize it to what you want and close the window. That in theory is how the Finder knows where you want new windows to open and how big you want them to be. In practice, it doesn't always work. So if anybody has a tip on actually getting it to remember those things, I'd love to know. It sometimes works. Just doesn't always work. Have you ever messed with that, John? No. Okay. So do your Finder windows open where you want slash expect them to? Not always. Yeah, okay. So it's okay. It's not just me. You know, I got to get a little exercise, you know, moving the track ball. Yeah, that's right. You're still a track ball guy. I always forget about that. Yeah, yeah. Well, on the for this machine, yes. Man, I've been using them forever. Well, one, it reduces the chance of RSI repetitive stress and injury that you're not moving your wrist around so much, right? Oh, interesting. I would have thought that a track ball would actually make that worse because of the angle that you're holding your you're holding your hand at a fixed angle while you're trying to move your fingers. I mean, I don't know. I've never used on long term, but that would have been my assumption. But again, no doctor and I have no experience. So. But I was but I ran into it initially, one of my internships decades ago when it was the turbo mouse. I think they still call it that back then. It was a cue ball with metal rollers. And that was kind of annoying because it would, you know, get gunk and stuff on it, sweating all that from your fingers every now and then. You had to clean it out here. Now the technology is that they actually use optical sensors right? Just I mean, it's the same that we did with mice, right? We went from using actual roller balls to optical sensors. And yeah, you're not collecting that crap. So which which track ball do you use nowadays? Yeah, it's the Kensington. Oh, OK. OK. Expert mouse it's called expert. I like it. It's got it's got four buttons that are programmable. It has a ring around the ball that you can use to scroll up and down and stuff. So yeah, and for gaming, I like it better than a mouse as well. Oh, interesting. Interesting. You know, spinning the ball, you know, like some arcade games for certain games, I think a track ball is better than yeah, and using you know, the mouse. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Cool. All right. This next one, I'm hoping Larry will post this in our forums at Mackie Cub dot com slash forums because you all deserve to see the results of the work that I'm going to describe. But Larry says I know you're all about fixing and repairing problems on your Apple products, but sometimes a Mac will no longer be repairable. True. He says my tip is how to continue to enjoy your Mac even after it dies. He says, of course, this tip as you'll find only applies to MacBooks that have the glowing Apple logo on the back of the lid. Many of these are going to be gradually phased out in the coming years. My wife's 2013 air finally gave up the ghost, so I decided to create something cool and practical from it. I removed the keyboard, the CPU, the screen, et cetera, and was left with a hollow aluminum shell. I purchased a MacBook skin for 20 bucks on Etsy and a Kugeek light strip for 40 bucks on Amazon, which works with HomeKit. He says I applied the skin to the back of the lid to create a piece of artwork. Sure. He says I inserted the curled up light strip inside the empty shell and situated it around the Apple logo. It's held in place with a packing tape. Apple had placed a piece of white material directly over the plastic logo. He says I left this as I think it helps the light coming through the logo be more evenly distributed. My guess is that's why they did that too. He says at night the light emits from the empty ports and the Apple logo glows according to the color of my choice. He says I hung it on the wall and now I can tell Siri to turn on the MacBook Air Lamp or make the MacBook Air Lamp red. He says you need to buy some special screwdrivers. He says I got mine from iFixit in order to get your old MacBook apart. Very, very cool stuff. I'm hoping he posts some pictures of this because he basically built a MacBook sconce is what he did. And I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. Pretty good, huh, John? Yeah. I've seen people do some cool things with their old Macs. Yeah. I'm the old iMacs. I've seen people make fish tanks out of them. The old like the Bondi Blues. Oh, the Bondi Blues. Oh, sure. Just like they did with the original like the, you know, the Mac 128 and the Mac Plus and all that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. All right. Let's see. Scott's question is or Scott's tip is one that we have been hanging on to for a little while here. It is catalyzed by a discussion in a previous show, but really the tip is evergreen as far as I'm concerned and quite quite thoughtful. So we'll let Scott share this one. Hey, guys, this is Scott down in the DC area. I know I'm a bit defined. I was listening to a show 742. Yeah, I'm a bit behind. Listen, one of the things that one of the guys was talking about having a hard drive error or a swapping error or something along those lines where things were happening and stuttering as he was doing on his computer. Another thing that can happen and you need to check is whether memory is okay. I don't know how I've seen it once happen once before, but if a ram chip goes bad it will try to work around it. If you've had too many patriots on that particular piece of ram, you'll see a lot of swapping on the disk. Memory is also a problem sometimes with MacBooks. I've had this with a MacBook. I don't remember if it was with a Pro, a MacBook that was MacBook Pro that was given to me by a previous employer. If you jostle it way too much if you're not that careful with it and to be a little overzealous with it you can also loosen the memory. If you're not getting the amount of memory you need to look through system profile, if you're not getting the amount of memory that you think you're getting then what you're probably doing at that point is thrashing which could cause all sorts of problems. When that should be something that you should always check especially on a laptop if you are going to be a little buckful with it then you should be. Anyway, happy new year, happy belated new year Scott DC. Thank you Scott and happy belated new year to you. He's right. Obviously ram can, if ram gets unceded or ram goes bad, you can start getting all kinds of crazy issues and sometimes as he pointed out, if it jostles loose, you may have less RAM in your system than you thought you did. I've always wondered why in the old days when I was working a lot on Windows machines if the amount of RAM changed it would tell you immediately when you turned it on it would be like, hey, Ram changed is this okay? And you'd say yes and it would save that in the BIOS and then everything would be fine. Macs don't do that, they've never done that. So you may think you have 8GB or 16GB of RAM but if one chip has jostled loose you might only have 4. So anyway it's a good thing to check and just sanity check yourself to make sure that you've got what you think you have. Pretty good, right, John? Yeah, I'm trying to remember so you might ask yourself, how can I test my RAM? In theory when you turn your machine on it does a very quick power on self-test but it may miss it now sometimes if it's like a permanent error you're going to hear a number of I don't know if they still do this but instead of your Macs starting up you'll hear a number of beeps Oh yeah, that's true if the RAM is bad I forget the code I'll dig around but I'm trying to remember what utility out there is good for testing RAM Yeah, I know MicroMAT had or has that utility called Atomic which will test RAM so I'll put a link to that in the show notes but I feel like there's um yeah, there's something that you're right well there used to be something that can do it No, no, you're right, okay, I'm sorry I found it. They make a utility called MacCheck and one of the tests so yeah, it checks your power on self-test, IO check, battery test memory test, smart test, RAID status oh interesting, volume structure partition map, look at that but this doesn't check RAM Oh no, it does, memory test Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, cool Yeah, I think it's a baby version of a stripped-down version of compared to some of the other tools Right, yeah, exactly, yep cool, cool cool, cool alright let's see so Jim noted something interesting and I'm going to try and sort of encapsulate this down. Jim uses AT&T for his iPhone, he has the hotspot functionality as part of that and uses it regularly so that his MacBook can get online while he's out and about and not near Wi-Fi or anything like that and he also uses a VPN with open VPN and what he has noticed is that if he follows the wrong path I was going to say the right path, but the wrong path he can connect his iPhone to open VPN and with his iPhone he can confirm by checking whatever whatismyip.com IP into Google and Google will return what it believes to be your IPv4 and IPv6 addresses or there is a website that he likes to use and I think it's browserleaks.com if I'm not mistaken about that but, you know, he can confirm that he is connected to his open VPN server and everything's good and, you know, his his IP is all good and then when he hotspots from his MacBook the MacBook does not go through open VPN it appears on his AT&T, you know LTE network or whatever that is and so, and he's able to reproduce this and I, you know like, it's legit I think what's happening here and we're going to do some more tests but I wanted to throw this out to the community too is that you know, open VPN is a third party VPN it installs a VPN profile and obviously does what it does but I think personal hotspot lives a level lower than this third party VPN and that's why his personal hotspot traffic is just being routed around it and I think it's a a function of iOS you would call it a bug or not depends on your perspective I suppose and I'm curious if this would also happen with a native VPN like an L2TP or an IKEV2 VPN that is native to iOS and not being controlled by some third party profile does that also suffer this so that's the thing I don't have personal hotspot on my devices so I'm unable to test so I think I can confirm this so I did a quick test here I don't think it matters so I run open VPN as well hosted on my Synology but if I was connected to Wi-Fi not my Wi-Fi and I VPN in and say what's my IP it's like oh yeah it's your optimum your home IP sure yeah of course if I turned off if I left the VPN on and I turned off Wi-Fi and I asked I asked what my IP is it's like oh yeah you're somewhere in Philadelphia because of your LTE connection right interesting so I think your theory about the layers is yeah now I wonder if you disconnected from open VPN turned off Wi-Fi and then reconnected I think you would see your home IP I think it's this disconnecting in the middle of a session thing it's probably because I've tested that part and that actually works like yeah oh and here's a good suggestion I think this sounds right here from our friend Brian Monroe in our chat room which is where's our chat room mackeykev.com right he'd have to run the VPN on his computer the VPN software yeah that would solve that would solve that part of it yes exactly yep again I'm just curious if this affects all VPNs on iPhones and hotspots or if it only affects like third party VPN you know profile based things so let us know if you can that would be a good thing alright John you you want to you want to take us to Bob my friend yeah I'll take us to Bob cool let's see Bob says I know you're at the Synology 2600 as the best standalone router personally I use zero at your recommendation which has worked out wonderfully my daughter is buying a small house 1200 square feet what is your recommendation for the best budget but relatively future proof router for a small house perhaps under $140 she lives alone and has a MacBook Air iPhone Apple TV and only one or two other connected devices well my recommendation Dave the router that I had before the Euro was something that was recommended by our pals at Wirecutter okay and they have an article here that they did in 2018 and they have a few recommendations here so I guess their top is the Netgear R7000 P Nighthawk yeah I would agree with that yeah I mean it's not better than the Synology by a long shot but if you're looking to save some money yes yeah sure and their second choice or the runner up is the Synology RT 2600 AC but their budget pick which I think definitely has the right price point is the TP-Link Archer A7 that's like old school man I had an Archer a different series I think the last Archer that I had was a different series so I guess the A means it's AC you would imagine but check this article out and see what you think but I think you have an additional suggestion well I do you know Synology uh has their RT 2600 AC they have the older and I think you can still get it their original their OG router which is the 1900 AC less radios or less streams less antennas it's got three antennas instead of four so it's a 3x3 not a 4x4 and slower CPU less RAM but still a good router however last year they introduced their mesh products and they did so with two things one was a software update that applies to the RT 2600 AC so that it can be the foundation of a mesh and then hardware they released their Synology MR 2200 AC which is their mesh router and those are built to be used as your mesh points if you have an RT 2600 AC and if you don't have an RT 2600 AC and you only buy one of these MR mesh router things the 2200 it will be your router and it will give you functionality like you know your you can have cloud station on it or drive you can have a VPN I believe it's got limited it's got a limited subset of the the main features of the 2600 AC but it's got the ones that you would want to use and it's 140 bucks and it's got Synology same web interface and all of that good stuff so and it's got three radios in it they aren't as powerful as the two radios that are in the the other one but it's got three radios in it which is why it's built for this meshing and can you know use the third radio for backhaul if it needs to etc etc so that's the other one I would throw out there is that so we'll put them all in the show notes I think any of these would be a fine option as a standalone router and of course the cool part with the with the Synology one is it is you know fully built to be a mesh router if in fact that's what you want so you can you know jump right up to that no problem if if you you know if you know if she moves or whatever you can take that with her and then add another and boom it'll it'll mesh right up the next year I believe that our 7000p will also do what they call their Nighthawk mesh stuff so you can buy one of their Nighthawk extenders and actually it'll it'll be smarter than just a normal extender too so all kinds of options John it's uh it's it's good to be in the it's good to be in the router market I guess so yeah yeah yeah cool yeah that TP link was a good router for you for a while they do I they I've always been impressed with them you know they they understand what they're doing so yeah man alright uh let's see let's go to let's go to Jessica here and uh Jessica I will find I promise I promise I will find it John and I did oh yeah Jessica says uh I had a MacBook Pro from 2013 but it crashed in January of this year and is now unusable should I get a refurb or brand new so um I'll answer the question and then I'll you know and then I have other thoughts too but um if what I want is available as a refurb from Apple the time that I want it I will buy refurb 100% of the time uh there's no reason that I can find not to buy refurb unless like happened with my MacBook Airs this winter I wanted to buy these I wanted to get my son I mean he needed a new laptop as did I quite frankly MacBook Airs came out they seem like the right things for us turns out they were the right things for us uh and of course they were relatively brand new I wouldn't get them on the refurb store yet and I don't even know if they're there now but they it's probably getting close if they're not there now they'll probably be in the next six or eight weeks I would assume but um the that's the only scenario where I would buy new otherwise I would buy refurb 100% of the time because you get the same one year warranty you get the same access to AppleCare Plus right you can buy AppleCare Plus for a refurb and it you know it then extends it to the three years on a on a laptop and you also get a computer that's been through the hands of an Apple technician whereas something coming off the assembly line actually really hasn't so arguably you're getting something that's a little more certified than something right off the assembly line brand new uh so I think you share those thoughts with me John but maybe yeah yeah no my next one I'm yeah uh to save some coin uh yeah I go for a refurb yeah now if you want to save even more coin Dave I just did some searching here yes so one and I think you and I have both taken advantage of this if you know someone at Apple they can give you an additional discount there's a friends and family program that's right um so if you know someone at Apple they can help you save a little more money but Apple also has and I did this back in the day a couple of different special stores so one thing um they have an employee purchase program where if you work for a big company and I did at one point um you get special pricing because you work for the company so they work out some special deal and there's a you know set discount for that um they also have an educational store so if you're in school um you probably save some money going through the education store and there's also a government store so if you work for the government you can get a special discount as well so yeah yeah and I have I it's been a long time since I've dug in enough to know the details of the educational store but I do know it used to be that it was the honor system and you could pick a school and and that was how it worked so uh there were some folks out there that uh chose perhaps to be students of life and take advantage of the the educational store so there you go I I don't know how it is now it in all likelihood it's been tightened up and you actually need to maybe have an email address for that school or whatever I don't know honestly now that I think about it I probably should have looked into that for the MacBook Airs that uh that Lucas and I got because my daughter actually and he they both are students at the university here and and he's a student at a high school so yeah yeah oh yeah and I remember toying around um so they used to have a certain structure to the URL and I think uh so like for example the employee purchase program right it was who participated so I think it was like you know whatever slash EPP slash and then the name of the company and then you could go into the store for someone that worked for that company but um right that's right for the most part it's the honor system um at least it used to be yeah yeah yeah so cool all right thank you uh thank you Jessica that was good you know anytime somebody says their computer is crashed I always you know here we take it at face value you know she wanted a refurb and it it makes for a good discussion but it is always worth anytime someone like personally calls me and says that my question is let's describe what we mean by crashed because it might be that say just your software is all you know munged up and you just need to nuke and pave and then the machine would be totally fine right so it it's always worth asking that question before we just go replace the machine and I just kind of wanted to point that out too no reason to dissect it anymore than that but yeah there we go all right man uh Michael gosh you know you're constantly finding things that used disk space just yesterday I was texting with you John that I you know right on this computer here I noticed that I had like no free space like I should have like you know 30 gigs for free space right now I have 40 I was down to like six or something and so I ran daisy disk which is what I run now because it's easier to do that in administrator mode so that's what I did and uh and it found that in my log folder the drive pulse logs from drive genius so drive pulse is the thing that runs all the time it saves I think I had 28 gigabytes worth of logs from this thing and the thing is when you launch drive genius it goes and sort of parses through and cleans up those logs whatever processing needs to happen it does but man like that's like I don't run drive genius all the time I don't need to so so I clean that up and then I turned off drive pulse John I'm done with it I use Lingon I want to have drive genius still installed because we tested here for some things but but I used Lingon to turn off the auto launch and the you know launch if it quits thing and um and so yeah that's crazy you know there's there's a slightly easier way to do that Dave how I just discovered this so um if you go to drive genius yeah preferences yeah there's a button on the bottom of the dialogue saying disabled drive pulse seriously I've looked for that before I've never found that all right well you know there you go color me uh someone who enjoys solving a problem the hard way I guess yeah but what you did is uh clever it's clever points for being clever yeah yeah it surprises me that yeah I mean I guess I don't know if they take them and you know phone home to collect stats or something like that I don't know man gosh even still even once I ran drive genius and it cleaned up the logs it went from like 28 gigs used down to 4 gigs used that's still way too much in my opinion so um we don't need that kind of data about my my drives health like so yeah it's all done yeah all right well there you go but but it is it does does give me an opportunity to mention Lingon 10 which it's Lingon X so call it what do you want that is such a valuable tool to use for managing all the startup items that are in like launch items and launch demons and all that stuff because you can really manipulate how they're interacting with the system and in this case you know really control it I of course didn't know that there was a way to just like disable this in the app but if I just deleted its P list file from launch agents or launch demons wherever it put it the next time I ran drive genius it put it back and relaunched drive pulse so I was able to leave that that P list file there and just modify it by turning off those checkboxes in uh Lingon and then it stayed not running which is you know what my goal so there you go anyway that was a long introduction to Michael who found yet another way to another place where space was being used John and Dave Michael calling from Long Beach regarding that kind of mysterious system storage issue that you guys were talking about in the last episode and I've been talking about a friend of mine texted me the other day he was having an issue that was apparently 170 gigs of system file taken up which only left him like a couple gigs free based on everything else he had on his computer I took him through Onyx you know Omidisk sweeper you weren't seeing anything he called Apple the guy quickly said go into mail apparently he had log connection activity selected in the mail app and it was 160 plus gigabytes of stuff that was taken up because of that um and he I guess he went in and trashed it he didn't give me the details of it but that might be something for people to look at if they're having this issue again log connection activity was selected in the mail app and it was keeping just this running tally of things so hopefully that might help somebody in terms of checking out a possible reason don't get caught yeah thanks Michael and don't get caught indeed um yeah so this is actually in mail to get to this check box that Michael's talking about you'd go to the window menu in mail and go to connection doctor and then in the lower right there you can check the box that says log connection activity and again you know it's the same thing right it's putting this stuff as a log somewhere Omidisk sweeper wouldn't see it because without full disk access and root access it can't look in those protected areas and one of those protected areas is your mail database or your mail folders so that's why it wasn't showing up there my guess is that daisy disk would have shown this and and that's why I'm I'm as a long time Omidisk sweeper user and lover I have I daisy disk is now my first one so yeah anyway nice catch man it's crazy so there you go and Brian Monroe is saying lower left corner that's interesting because I tested this on my Mojave machine and it was lower right for me I am almost certain but you know memory is a tricky thing so thank you Brian Monroe in the chat room good stuff we will it'll be lower left or lower right it's called log connection activity so sweet and Brian Monroe says yes it's lower right okay cool either way you'll find it you're all good while we are here John I want actually I want to take a minute and talk about our next two sponsors if that works for you my friend Danny alright we've all read some surprising online reviews right you know whether you're trying to get a sweet deal on something you've been saving for or looking for that new nest unit you know it's generally a good idea to read the reviews first that's why we're here at MacGicab so we can talk about this stuff right so why should finding the right software for your business be any different enter our sponsor for today at captera.com mgg where you can read thousands of real software reviews and find the right software for your business again that's captera.com mgg they've got over 750,000 reviews of products from real software users allowing you to discover everything you need to make that informed decision and that's why they're the leading free online resource to help you find the best software for your business they've got stuff in over 700 categories no matter what kind of software your business needs captera makes it easy to discover the right solution and there's millions of people that are using this very 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about monitoring bandwidth used on your Mac and you know we talked about well if your router supports it this that and the other thing but we really didn't come up with a great way to monitor the bandwidth that's being used by your Mac until Simon and I think somebody in the chat room suggested this to be perfectly fair it may have been Simon but suggested I'm going to go ahead and do a quick recap called trip mode we've talked about trip mode on this show before trip mode is great because it allows you to decide to not let certain apps access the internet while you're on whatever kind of connection maybe you're on a limited data connection through your hot spot or you know for whatever reason maybe you know in a hotel and it's crappy and you don't want your backups to try and run and use all of that stuff so trip mode is perfect for this but he says you can also set it to monitor internet usage on connections to set it to monitor over a month and it will keep you up to date with usage right there in the toolbar he says just ensure that all apps are allowed access to the internet because trip mode otherwise will limit them doing what it's supposed to he says and boom you're good to go thank you Simon that's awesome that's a great idea we'll put a link to trip mode in the show notes for absolutely cool in the forums well someone actually many of you asked but there was a question in the forums too so I'll point you there where mac tech freak asked he says I know you were talking about blocking spam calls and he says I can't remember what Dave's recommendation for stopping spam calls or robocalls was on iOS for Verizon users he says I have Verizon wireless and they are directing me to Google which is a buck 99 a month does anyone know if the service is legit so here's the thing listener Joe sent us a facebook message about this too and pointed that while Verizon's current solution is a for pay solution there was an article in January on the verge that said that Verizon will offer free spam protection to all of its customers coming in March guess what month we're in March so even better mac tech freak in the forums signed up for the service was charged the 299 which is what Verizon charges for their own thing they call it the call filter service and then he called Verizon and said hey I thought this was supposed to be free in March and the rep said yeah it's not quite free yet but here's a credit for your your first month so hopefully by the time the next month comes around it's free for him and maybe for all of you so there you go like I said in the last show using AT&T's call protect is stellar I really really like I understand why you're driven crazy by the spam calls on your phone John because without AT&T's call protect I'd probably be you know driven crazy and annoyed just as frequently so yeah it's good stuff look at this Verizon call filter yeah I'm looking on my phone here and I see a little cloud with an arrow so at one point I tried it but yeah I think I stopped because they were charging for it they won't I'll give them a buzz or actually stop by their store they have a store couple of stores in town I should go in there see what the dealio is cool fixed on 66 points out in the chat room that Mr. Number is the need to get the link right Mr. Number is an app or service or probably a combination of both Mr. Number call block and lookup number one call blocking and spam protection app so I will put a link to this in the show notes thanks for that fixed on 66 good stuff Mr. Number pretty good huh John alright it was also in 751 that we were talking about two factor authentication and specifically we were talking about it in the context of developer ideas needing it and listener Eric pointed us to a support article actually to be fair it wasn't just Eric he just happened to have been the first many many of you sent this in and it's fantastic and it's interesting because in the same episode at a different time we were talking about for folks that wanted to share contacts one thing that you can do is put a second iCloud account on you know on your Mac and sync just contacts with that well the same trick will work for this you have to create the separate user account in order to set up two factor authentication that's just how that works but once you've done that you can then add that iCloud account as a secondary iCloud account turn off all the syncing add it to your Mac add it to your iOS devices and then when you go to log in you'll get the normal Apple two factor authentication notifications so that's pretty good and like I said we've got a support article here that that supports that and explains it so we'll put that out there so thank you Eric pretty good yeah I actually found that out after so I didn't read the instructions because of course it's me but yes I created a separate account on my machine called John Brown developer set it up with set that account up with my developer Apple ID and then when I went back to my regular account Dave it had populated that ID in my list really oh that's interesting yeah but it said inactive so and once I activated it the thing is now I don't have to run this other user right yeah exactly yeah that's the point to do Xcode or access the developer so um that's pretty good cool on the subject of two-factor authentication listener Ron ran into an interesting scenario where he was trying to connect his I'm trying to think I think it was just mail or a mail client maybe it was for some reason he needed to send mail through mobile me why do I say mobile me through iCloud oh right he wanted to get carbon copy cloner to send him emails and to do that you have to give carbon copy cloner the credentials for a mail server that it can use on your behalf to send mail out through carbon copy cloner doesn't have its own mail server you just provide yours no problem you put in the server name the username and password all good Ron does not have did not have two-factor authentication turned on when you do have two-factor authentication turned on for iCloud you can't just give it your normal password in a scenario like this because your normal password is only good with the two-factor authentication and Apple doesn't really support that for third parties what they do offer as a work around is that you go in and you create an application specific password that you can then plug in as a separate password for your wife or for your email and then this would work but because he didn't have two-factor authentication on he had no way of creating a second password and wouldn't need to or so he thought he tried every which way from Sunday to plug in his username and his password into carbon copy cloner and every time it would fail at authenticating and then he thought well I got to move to two-factor authentication at some point anyway so he moved to it he created a secondary password you know an app specific password for this for carbon copy cloner and boom it worked right away so it seems as though iCloud's SMTP server doesn't accept your normal login even if you don't have two-factor authentication on or at least it didn't for Ron so if you run into this problem know that two-factor authentication is the answer and then once you have that then you need to go and create the app specific passwords and we'll put a link I think Apple's got a a an article about creating app specific passwords so we'll put that in the show notes too pretty interesting workaround or solution right yes interesting interesting it seems like Apple is very much you know like it's pretty clear they are requiring this two-factor authentication you know I don't blame them without it people are more far more susceptible to being you know having their accounts compromised and that creates a nightmare for Apple in many many different ways so I get it I get it any thoughts on that John before we move on to the next tip here moving on moving on up alright Jeff take it away man hey John and Dave this is Jeff calling from Long Island in episode 751 you had a user write-in and say how his crash plan professional backup solution wasn't working because he could only restore 250 megabytes of data that's not true if you download the crash plan app you can restore anything you want if you use their web interface then yes they have limited you to about that amount in the past and I assume based on his situation that continues to be so not that I've been a big friend of crash plans since they got rid of their consumer services but I just wanted to make sure you got the right information out there have a Coolio week thank you so much Jeff yeah we will and that many of you of course sent in comments correcting us on that and some even suggested that you might be able to go into your preferences online and change that limit as well but certainly using the crash plan app there is no such limit so thank you Jeff Joe was one of the other ones John that wrote in about this and offered that correction and also reminded us that he prefers to use an online backup program called arc backup ARQ and I've been using ARQ on and off actually for years we've mentioned on this show several times but now they have their arc cloud and so ARQ was originally created to connect to it was the software only and then you would pick your cloud that you wanted to connect to right and it could be Amazon Web Services it could be S3, it could be Backblazes B2, it could be Google Drive it could be Dropbox right like they supported a lot of different things well recently in the last year I think they created their own cloud to make life even easier especially for first-time users and it's priced pretty aggressively if you're using you've got one terabyte of storage included for 60 bucks a year that's not too shabby and I've been using it on my iMac down in the office and it works great so thank you for the note Joe and the reminder about ARQ that's pretty good stuff thoughts on this John? nope I think I have it somewhere yeah it's good it's very simple it just does what it does and that's kind of the point so yeah alright let's see going to Rich offers about an app to essentially give us stickies functionality without being stickies maybe being something that is more tied to the menu bar and can hide and appear anywhere and we offered some thoughts in the last show well we got lots of thoughts from you folks and I think Rich might have nailed it but we have a few to share so Rich says the app that I use now is called Tike at TYKE.app I like it because it's very simple it gives me quick access to one block of text and I use it all the time he says the first app that I tried though was called Thought Train at thoughttrain.cc I believe we have both links in the show notes he says it works very well and seems like what your listener was actually looking for as it holds multiple text snippets after trying both for my needs he says I prefer the simpler interface and functionality of TYKE so thank you for that Rich that's exactly what we're looking for I love it when the geek challenge actually results in an answer and isn't just everybody agreeing like yeah it would be great if this actually was something we could solve but we can't so let's see Elliott along the same lines had some app suggestions he says Brian who's the listener didn't say how he'll use the notes when he accesses them but if he has to insert them into documents email messages etc he says he could make snippets in text expander or Alfred very good point he says there are also extended clipboard apps he says I use one called copied but keyboard maestro could also be used this way that's also true and if you are not yet using an app that gives you clipboard history I'm not quite sure how you're functioning on the Mac at your full potential my guess is that you're not like it is super helpful to have a history of everything that's been put in your clipboard you know if I want to copy a few things from a web page and then paste them into an email I can be in the web page highlight copy highlight copy highlight copy now I've got those three things on my clipboard now I go back to the email and I can paste and pick which one I want to paste in at a time and I'm not having to go back and forth and also it saves me if I copy something to the clipboard and then accidentally or not accidentally but forget that I wanted to preserve the clipboard and then copy something else with the normal clipboard gone with the clipboard history app not gone it's awesome so there's my plug for that keyboard maestro does that but there's other apps that do it too Brian says sorry Elliott says for Brian's problem in the last show one of the several shelf utilities that's out there either Yoink or Gladys that can park text indefinitely might also be good so thank you thank you thank you everybody good good stuff I like it any thoughts on that John did you have any further thoughts as the as the week progressed I actually found this article from set up called how to access clipboard copy paste history on a Mac I haven't gotten a punchline yet stay tuned my guess is my guess is that it is a a plug for some app that's inside set up that offers clipboard history set ups awesome by the way while we're at it it's what does this say it says not many people know that Mac OS has a hidden secondary keyboard select any text press control K to paste it control Y speak up on this what are you talking about maybe put a link in the show notes for it yeah no it's an article from set up says how to access clipboard copy paste history on a Mac yeah although I'll paste it in yeah okay cool you cool cool yeah I will take us to so there you go but set up in general is if you are someone who uses you know lots of little apps and utilities like we all do here check out set up for I think it's still 10 bucks a month and you just get access to this huge library of applications that's really fantastic I needed something the other day to convert flak files into mp3 or AAC files somebody had sent me actually some fish shows and I wanted to I didn't need them as flak I don't like need that kind of quality 256k AAC would be fine and so I looked in set up and there's an app called permute it was like perfect that's it just converted them fine actually it had a little problem but you know we fixed it now it's fine so very very cool stuff alright and then on the lastly on the tips here listener Keith has one from a few shows ago but we were talking about he was the one who suggested I believe using the second or the extra iCloud account on your family plan as the place to use all your storage and he said just use the web interface once you've created the account and upload from there well that works but if you want to upload something like your photos library that way which if you're using iCloud photo library maybe you do maybe you don't it's not all that much fun because it's you know it's that's essentially a folder full of lots and lots of files and that can be very tedious to try and manage with a web interface so he recommends using an app called better zip better zip that will create a multi file zip where each file is just eight gigs and so now he's got these you know sort of bands that he can upload and everything's good so cool stuff found there on better zip thank you for for recommending it and also for you know the use case there too very cool Keith cool stuff all right let's see where we are here I want to take a minute and thank all of our Mackie keb premium supporters whose contributions came in this week and if you want to learn about premium of course Mackie keb.com slash premium but we had a one time $25 contribution from Anthony in New York and then we had $25 contributions on our biannual plan from Joe B from Mexico Drake from Hawaii and Pierre Teemo so thanks to all of you for those contributions and then on the monthly $10 plan we had contributions from Paul from Indiana, Mike from New York Mark from Connecticut working smarter for Mack users Bob down in Austin James from Texas, Ryan from Texas Neil from Connecticut and Scott from Portland so thanks to all of you as I always say we couldn't do this show without you but it does remind me of Texas where I'm going to be for South by Southwest and also on Tuesday night I will be speaking at the Cap Mack meeting so I will put a link in the show notes to that as well and I'll post it I know this show is only going to come out on Monday so I'll post something this weekend on Twitter too and all that stuff so hopefully hopefully I can see some of you coming out there please do come out they are a good bunch of people and yeah you know it's always fun getting together with Cap Mack and down there in Austin so I'm trying to find a link for it and it wants to put me in DC I'm not going to DC I'm hopefully flying over DC so there we go alright Jim had a really good question John Jim asked he said I know that data that I have uploaded either directly or indirectly to iCloud is encrypted at rest as default and also in transit as part of the process of being uploaded to iCloud and also stored and you are right about that it is both encrypted in transit using HTTPS like a secure web browser or a secure website and then also iCloud encrypts it at rest on their servers he says my question is if I have encrypted my macOS hard drive via file vault is my data stored on iCloud then in effect double encrypted and this is a fantastic question and offers an opportunity to kind of dig into how this is done so the answer is no it's not double encrypted but let's look at why so you when you have when you first create your data it is you know unencrypted you type a note let's just take a note a note that we are going to save as a file and then put in our iCloud drive so we have the note as soon as we save it that data is encrypted when it's saved to your disk so now it's encrypted at rest and if someone were to get a hold of your hard drive if someone were looking over your shoulder they would see the unencrypted data because it's unencrypted when you're reading it but then once you close the file and save it it is encrypted at rest so all good that's file vault when you go to upload this to iCloud the first thing that happens is the document is read from the disk and what happens when the document is read from the disk it is decrypted that's how file vault works so now we have decrypted data now this decrypted data is sent securely over an encrypted web link to Apple great when it gets there the secure web link encrypts it before it sends it and decrypts it on the other end so now it's decrypted again and then Apple encrypts the data and stores it encrypted so it's again stored encrypted and of course when you read it from iCloud the data is decrypted sent across the secure web link so it's this multiple stage process where at pretty much every stage especially if you've got file vault turned on your data is being encrypted when it's being encrypted when it's read or sent and decrypted when it's sorry let me say that the right way it's encrypted when it's written or sent and decrypted when it is read or received and that's just how that works so nothing's ever double encrypted as part of this you certainly could double encrypt something by putting it in a secure disk image that's encrypted but otherwise no it's all being you know decrypted and then it re-encrypted so thoughts on that John? I have no doubt you have thoughts on this um no I think it's safe to say that during the process it's encrypted multiple times and decrypted multiple times that's right yeah right so you have the file vault key you have a temporal key for SSL TLS and that it's a randomly generated every time and then you got the key on the end yeah so it's encrypted and decrypted three times exactly yeah exactly so it's not I think that's the safest way to say it it's not double encrypted or triple encrypted but it's encrypted three times yeah no that's exactly yeah that's a perfect way to encapsulate it yeah I agree I don't know if you're on Wi-Fi it's encrypted again right if you're on secure Wi-Fi that's absolutely right yeah that's correct actually at that point it would be double encrypted temporarily right if you're on encrypted Wi-Fi and you are which is Wi-Fi with a password and you are sending to iCloud your Wi-Fi connection is encrypted and then the tunnel to iCloud is also encrypted via SSL beneath that so there would in transit it's possible that this could be double encrypted yes that's right that's right yeah at Brian Monroe actually I like the way he's describing it in the chat room he says it's a chain of encryption and decryption yeah that's a good way to say it while we're talking about encryption and protection and you mentioned Wi-Fi that's a perfect thing I know we're gonna run like a wee bit long but Ken writes he says I've used a VPN for a few years and lately I've noticed that in certain environments VPNs are blocked for example he says Xfinity public Wi-Fi blocks all internet traffic and I recently found a hospital I was visiting blocked the internet when I was using a VPN too off the VPN and the internet flows fine he says I checked the VPN provider and they confirmed that this was the case so is the answer to install your own VPN well the question is which ones are they blocking and you sort of need to figure this out because we use VPNs here all the time as I mentioned we have several VPNs set up in our home that we host and then of course we've got some third party ones that we also use and test and all of that stuff we had sort of the biggest issue that we've had is this game of cat and mouse that I've been playing with my kids school for years and they have routinely blocked different things they blocked open VPNs default ports they blocked L2TP VPNs default ports so anytime I had those kinds of things set up here you know it would work for a little while and then it would be blocked so I moved to Synology's VPN which runs or I can choose to run on port 443 now 443 for those of you who don't know is the port that all encrypted web traffic runs over so there's no way I thought they're going to be blocking port 443 they can't otherwise nothing would work at the school and that worked that was that theory held water everything was great until this year you know in the fall my son got to school came home and he's like VPN doesn't work are you freaking kidding me like what happened well we did some testing and we realized that they are blocking the entire range of Comcast home addresses which describes what we have so port 443 is fine you just can't get to any port on my home IP here with Comcast awesome well right about the same time ExpressVPN came on board as a sponsor here from Akika and so I said well let's see we tried other third party VPNs they were being blocked he tried ExpressVPN no issue whatsoever it just went right through everything was fine so it depends on your VPN service but as we found ExpressVPN and it's serendipitous that they are a sponsor and came on board as a sponsor but I would have thought to test them man we've been through enough third party ones here we go so there you go ExpressVPN worked really well and because they aren't a sponsor of this episode but because they're an active MGG sponsor expressvpn.com MGG gets you a deal so you can use that too so but the point is try you're gonna have to just look at the specific scenarios that matter to you and then figure out what solution is going to work for those and it's gonna take some trial and error is really what it comes down to it's pretty crazy yeah interesting for a moment I thought that maybe they had like some packet inspector that would try to detect VPNS traffic they could I mean that's certainly possible you could do deep packet inspection yep and say wait a minute I think they have boxes that'll do that and I'm sure our schools firewalls are capable of doing that at some level but the question is you know how will they institute that because it requires you know everything you do at that level starts increasing your CPU requirements so it's like you really want to do DPI on sorry DPI is deep packet inspection do you want to do that on all of these connections that are happening all day long do you have enough horsepower to dedicate to that maybe yeah right I mean the box that does that yeah it's either gonna take some processing or money and it's like is it really worth the effort you know yeah what's the goal here yeah yeah control well the big problem is that like Gmail is blocked on our school network and so you know my wife too cause she's subs there sometimes and she's like oh yeah I have to go stand by the window and turn off wifi to get an LTE connection you know it's a big brick building so the LTE doesn't work too well in there right and it's like she just needs to check her mail and it happens to be a hosted Google business account and it's like well yeah so there you go it's crazy man it's crazy but you know that's how it works it's a cat and mouse game and like I said I'm it was just pure serendipity that Express VPN came on board when they did and it was perfect so so there we have it that's how it's gonna work that's uh yeah man I got blocked using the local grocery store wifi I think they installed a new network and I was trying to go to a site and it said yeah oddly enough so we got some new lottery machines around here sure and their network the old ones would just dispense scratch off the new ones now they actually watched them set one up the IP address and stuff so it's using LTE I guess but I I tried to go to the site of the lottery and it said uh no you can't and I'm like what it was like we're blocking this as questionable content I'm like dude yeah yep there you go so turn on Express VPN and I bet you'll get there no problem so yeah I know I'll try that today yeah I think honestly I think part of the reason that Express VPN works is that they don't just have one path in they they try multiples you don't see this as the user they make it super easy for you but um I think I think that's why my son was able to like you know they just have they know that it's a game of cat and mouse and obviously they've got some experience with that so they you know they probably they just offer okay that one doesn't work try this try this try this okay we're in good sweet so hey all of all alright man well I think that's gonna do it for us we've told you about the email addresses did I mention premium at MackieGibb.com earlier I think I did that's where all of you premium folks get to email it's a priority address for us I'm gonna be traveling this week I will try and stay on top of things John will also stay on top of things and we will get there we'll get your stuff answered and and all that good stuff so visit us there visit the forums MackieGibb.com forums of course great place to not only have John and I help you answer your questions but everybody is part of the community we all sort of pitch in and help each other which is sort of the point and really actually kind of makes us all really lucky that we're part of this so thank you folks for listening thanks to cashfly at cashfly.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the podcast from us to you thanks to all of our sponsors as I mentioned in the show we have hairclub.com we have capterra.com we have jamf.com and then in our podcast marketplace of course as I mentioned we have expressvpn.com smilesoftware.com otherworldcomputing at maxsales.com barebonessoftware barebones.com yeah awesome awesome awesome thank you so much everybody we'll see you we'll see you when I'm back from Austin unless we get a wild hair and somehow schedule something to record well in there but I don't think we will but you never know have a good week John help me help me I'm gonna help you Dave I'm gonna give you some advice because you're gonna have to go through PSA and whatnot I just have one although you have pre-check last I checked I do I don't have clear I want clear that's the next thing I want but I don't have it yeah I'll have to find out what that is but um anyways the three words of advice I have for you during your travels Dave is don't get caught made up