 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, Episode 769 for Monday, July 8th, 2019. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, and really anything else you send us and we go through it. We digest it. We answer the questions if we can. We process it. We formulate it into an agenda that we're about to go through here such that with the purpose, the intention is that we each learn five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include linode.com.mgg, barebones.com, and captera.com.mgg. We'll tell you why you will have wanted to go to those URLs, so you've already gone to them because we've said them to you and you like to help us out by visiting our sponsors. We will tell you later why you will have gone to them because that's what we do. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Triple Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How are you today, Mr. John F. Braun? Fantastic. Landtastic. That's good. That's good. Well, no. Landtastic. No, you're better than Landtastic because Landtastic, I don't think still exists. Does Landtastic exist? I don't know. It was a thing. It was a way of like connecting things. Admin and control and stuff. Is that what it was? Okay. Thought so. Yeah, no, I think you're right. I don't know. Man, like, it's been too long. I'm pretty sure I used it. It would know. Okay, it was. I, you know, I, Wikipedia confirmed that it was what I thought it was, peer to peer local network. So you connect multiple computers together and you could like transfer data, you know, kind of like we do with Ethernet now, but that's not how it worked. Yeah. No, I distinctly remember in a prior consulting gig, setting up somebody with Landtastic. He's like, well, I want to access my computer system remotely. I'm like, well, there you go. Yeah. And he bought it and I set it up and everything was working. And then I sent him a bill and he didn't pay me. And then he called me and said, well, it's not working. And I'm like, well, it was working when I left. So, you know, it's just, this should be for the small business show. It should. It's like, what do you do when people stiff you when you leave? No, this is a good question. And everything is working. And then all of a sudden they say, well, now it doesn't work anymore. It's like, yeah, we, we, we have a lot of consultants who listen to this show. So well, I wouldn't necessarily open with this particular topic. We're here. So it, um, no, because this happens. So the, the, in a nutshell, the trick is really the trick starts at the beginning of the visit where I always like to say you, and this can work with family members too. Even though they're not paying you, you don't want it to be your fault. That can be even be worse. It's one thing if somebody just like stiffs you for 100 and 200 bucks or whatever. It's like, yep, whatever lesson learned. When it's a family member, you can't avoid them usually. So maybe it's even more important. I think of this, like I said, starting with the moment the visit starts. And what I do is I try and think about it as not you versus your computer and me, but rather you and me versus your computer. So I think of it as different sides of the desk. Like I'm here with you, we're shoulder to shoulder, and we are tackling your problem with your computer. I'm here to help you not take responsibility for your computer. So I, and that, you know, there's a lot of different ways that that's can sort of manifest itself. But if you just keep that in your mind that you can kind of steer things that way. And I always explain what I'm doing that can also help prove value, right? Like you did a thing for me, even if we didn't get a solution. Oh, and I did that. I held their hand. I'm like, let's go through the process. I'm going to document what you need to do and very specifically, and let's go through it once just to make sure that I'm explaining it right there were and I'm like, okay, everything's great. I think the client's happy. And before I leave, I always, I do, I mean, I don't usually, I don't actually do this, but I go through my process where I sit on my hands and I'm not allowed to touch the computer and the client has to go through and make sure everything works. And then it's like, okay, cool, it works, right? And of course, if you can just get paid right there, then life's easy. And these days, that's way easier because in addition to being able to do checks on the spot, now you can take credit cards on the spot or, you know, Venmo or Apple like cash or whatever. But yeah, that's the trick is sort of proving, being on the same side of the desk and also proving value throughout and not letting the solving of the problem be the only value they see, right? Like, you know, that whole customer service thing all the way through. So that even if you get to the end, you say, okay, well, your problem wasn't solvable. They say, okay, well, I appreciate your time. Now I know my problem wasn't solvable. Previously, I just knew I had a problem or whatever it is, you know, some. So maybe that answers somebody's question. I don't know. You know what else might help you is our first sponsor, which is Linode at linode.com slash mggline.com. This is where you can go to set up a server on all SSD based storage, right? They're on 40 gigabit networks, industry leading processors. And the cool part is certainly you can get like, you know, dedicated CPUs and all that stuff, if you need that, but if you don't need that, you can start with what they call a nanode at just five bucks a month. And this is a server you can log into and put whatever you need on it and run it. And it certainly is a way to get started with something there. And it might even be enough, depending on your usage and your needs, it might even be enough to just run full time and you don't need to even upgrade from there. They've got 10 data centers worldwide. They're opening Mumbai, India by the end of this year. They just opened Toronto. Very, very cool stuff. And they make it super easy. If you want to log into the command line and set everything up yourself, no problem. Just go to linode.com slash mggline.com, sign up, use coupon code mggline.com to zero one nine. So you get a $20 credit. That's pretty cool. And then, you know, you sign up and you pick what size server you want. So let's say you pick a nanode for five bucks a month, which means you'd get four months of that for free with mggline.com 2019. And and then, you know, you can get a command line and they'll give you a root password and where to log in and boom, you're done. But if you don't know how to do any of that command line stuff or you don't want to do it, even if you do know how to do it, they have these auto setup things where you can say, I want a WordPress running WordPress installation and it will automatically put PHP in my SQL and all of the other stuff that you don't even need to know about on there and say, cool, go here, log into your WordPress and you're done. And you can do that with a VPN. You can do it with a Minecraft server. You can do it with all kinds of stuff. Want Team Fortress 2? You want to run your own server somewhere in the cloud? Linode's the place to do it. So go check this out. Linode.com slash mggline.com 2019 gets you $20 credit as a coupon code there. So you want to do that. Our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. John, my thanks to you for starting our first question. Oh, no, no, thank you. OK, and our first question is here from Steven. And this is a good one, I think it has multiple facets. So Steven says, hello, David, John. I have a mid 2011 iMac and a brother laser jet HL dash L2340DW that don't get along quite often when I print wirelessly. As the printer revs up, the iMac will reboot. I suspect the printer is drawing too much power and causing the reboot. The iMac is plugged into an APC back dash UPS 550. And the APC and printer shared an outlet. I've already moved the printer to another outlet in the room, but this continues to happen. Is there anything I could buy to replace the APC and prevent this from happening or could there be another cause for the reboots? And quite honestly, Steven, I don't think it's a power issue. Seeing as how you move the printer to another outlet and the problem still occurred, so that was good diagnostics there. But even if it was, I don't see any way that the iMac could be aware of the printer drawing too much power. Yeah, I think even electricity and stuff. I don't see how the iMac is is going to know that. If anything, if the printer is drawing too much power, it's going to blow a fuse or something or it's going to shut down. Yeah, at first I thought when I first read this and you had already answered it, so I didn't pay close attention. But at first I thought that the printer was plugged into the UPS. And then it would, in theory, be possible for the printer to be drawing too much power for the UPS to provide, say, battery power. And that could cause some problems. Plugging a late and I looked that up. Believe it or not, I looked that up and this printer, depending. So one, the brother side is kind of weird in where they have the info because I was like, well, how much power does this thing draw? I mean, where I looked, I either got no answer, but I finally found it. So it draws about a thousand watts. OK, so that's and that UPS and that UPS is rated for less than that. Way less than that. Five hundred fifty volt amps and you got to do the math. So yeah, but so but he doesn't he didn't even at the beginning. He didn't have the printer plugged into the UPS. So that seems really weird. But especially now with it on a different outlet. Yeah, so I don't think that's a problem. But the thing is, I think Stephen may be on to something here because I don't know about you, but I seem to recall that the not just the twenty eleven, but the twenty eleven did have a power supply issue. I know that a little surfing. And I think they actually had some recalls on that. So it may be the power supply in your iMac. But why would I mean it's a twenty eleven? When the I mean when the printing subsystem and it's not like the computer shutting off, it's rebooting. So this tells me it's a software problem, I think. Yeah. And that was the path I thought potentially it could be a weird it could be a failing power supply. It could. But if it's always happening. Yeah. Yeah. Only when you're printing, then I would agree with you. And that's actually the path I took here. So the thing is I'm almost sure it's an issue with your printing subsystem. First, I would install the latest driver. Now, as I mentioned, the brother finding the right driver on the brother site is. I mean, I found one source and it was like, oh, I have drivers up to 10.9. And I'm like, well, that's not good. And then I finally found one. So the thing is first, I would install the latest driver. That could be the problem. And I found a link where it listed all the way up to Mac OS 10.14 drivers for that printer. So that's what I do. Also, on that same site that I sent, there's actually a firmware update for that printer. It could be a bug in the printer. I don't know. Sure. It could be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the first thing would be install the latest drivers. I'm almost certain it's. It's entirely possible it's a driver bug. So get the latest driver for your printer. Apple provides them. Yes. And when you go to system preferences, printer and scanners. And you add a printer. A lot of times it will default to whatever the vendors have given to Apple. Sometimes they're not entirely up to date. So I would check the vendor site to get the latest one. Yeah. But if if he's having a problem, I would try it with like wipe the printing system and put just an Apple driver. Like don't install the third party stuff. Just try it with the Apple driver. All right. You know, I mean, he won't necessarily get all the latest and greatest features out of the Apple driver, although he might. But certainly that would be the safest way to go if there is some problem with perhaps, you know, some helper app that brother is sending and it's causing an incompatibility with something else that probably won't be there if he's just using the Apple driver. So right, right, you know, it's just change things. Right. See what see what makes it. So yeah. So I would try that first. The second thing I would try is if it's still doing that. If you go to system preferences, printers and scanners and right click on one of the printers, as you pointed out, you can reset the printing system. It could be that you have corruption in your printer, driver, whatever. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Now, the last thing with this printer, so I look at this printer and actually it's a pretty dandy printer. I think it actually does duplex, which is kind of neat for a. Laser printer so we can print. I think I saw that in the description. But the final thing, Dave, is this printer has, although it's kind of a cop out, I guess, but the thing is this printer not only offers wireless printing, but it offers USB and LAN. So I don't know, try a USB connection or a LAN connection. Well, wouldn't Wi-Fi be a LAN connection? Right. I'm just saying there are different physical connections to this printer in addition to wireless. So. But I think that I think the only physical connection is USB. I think it I don't think there's an ethernet port on this printer. I'm pretty sure there is. Oh, really? I know. I looked at the specs. Oh, so it has USB, it has USB ethernet and Wi-Fi. Got it. OK. So it's so it's got a good set of features. There could just be some weird bug between their driver and the Wi-Fi in the printer, which is why also mentioned, hey, update the firmware in the printer. Yeah, right, right. So I've never. It's just a weird one. That is a weird one. You try to print your I've never heard of that personally. Yeah, there's no ethernet on this. I'm looking on their specs page. It supports LAN printing, but that's when you connect via Wi-Fi to your to your network. Oh, all right. It's got a USB port Wi-Fi. But but that's to be fair. And now I see where the confusion came from. It has high speed USB 2.0, wireless 802.11 BGNN, and also what they call Wi-Fi direct. So maybe it hosts its own access point if it can't connect to your LAN or whatever. Like, OK, you know what I mean? Yeah, so. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, trying the USB might. I mean, again, yeah, I think you're right. Just change things until you find the one thing that that doesn't cause your Mac to reboot. Also, take a look like, does your Mac come up with a crash log after it reboots? And if so, what does that say? A lot of those can be gibberish, but sometimes those crash logs can be helpful. I always look at them if I don't know why something happened. And most of the time, it'll be something that doesn't make sense. But if you just read through it, you might see like, oh, it was trying to load this little thing. Oh, right. That's a new thing I put. I wonder if that's causing an incompatibility or something along those lines. So I don't know. Yeah. So, Stephen, let us know. Yeah, let's just keep just keep changing things until it works. That's right. Yeah, I mean, well, when you say it that way, it sounds sort of silly, but but it is true. It's it's a good that. I mean, it does have me scratching my head over what. I mean, it sounds like you said this machine for a while. So it's like what all of a sudden caused this? What else changed to bring upon this dilemma? Well, resetting the printing subsystem might do it. He might have like an old job out there that is, you know, in the way and the printer is like, oh, I have to print this one first, but it's something that is corrupt in such a way that it causes the machine to, you know, fritz out. Oh, you know, that's you know, I actually have had that. I have had jobs and sometimes, at least with PostScript. So you have PostScript, PCL, all these languages. Sometimes. I've gotten. Yeah, I've gotten like you said, I got an error. It's like, well, this job crashed. And I'm like, well, what? Yeah, what? Right. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Stephen, let us know. Hope. Yeah. And if anybody else has a question, feedback at Mackie Cub dot com. No, no, no, no, no, it's feedback at Mackie Cub dot com. Oh, I swear to you, it's feedback at Mackie Cub dot com. We got another email into that address, too. Actually, this one came into premium at Mackie Cub dot com. And it comes from JP who says, fellas, I'm about to get tunnel bear of VPN, but I wanted to clarify something that is rudimentary, probably. Do I need a VPN while on my home network or just when I'm traveling or on some open network? Does the VPN offer any type of security while I surf from my desktop at home? And if so, what? This is a good question. I rarely use a VPN from home. I only do it if I want to a hide what I'm doing from Comcast, right? Because I use Comcast as my they're my provider. So if I'm doing something that I don't want Comcast to know about, then I would use a VPN. That that's one thing of VPN would do. Or be if I want to hide the fact that I am on Comcast or or hide my general area or something from wherever I'm visiting. Other than that, I don't really find a need to use a VPN on my home network. Now, another reason to use a VPN on my home network would be if I wanted to tunnel into, say, my office and my office wasn't right next to my house connected via Ethernet. That would be another reason to use a VPN from home. So those are kind of the three. Traveling, though, I use one almost all the time because you don't know who's controlling the network. Like at home, I know Comcast is. So if I want to hide something from Comcast, which really doesn't happen all the time. But if I wanted to a VPN, I don't know who's controlling networks at the hotel or, you know, at the coffee shop. And it might even though they have a Comcast connection, who's the network administrator of the hotel or of the coffee shop? And are they sniffing things or did they leave it wide open? And maybe somebody else is sniffing things that I don't know about. That's when I want to run a VPN. And I've I've been using Express VPN since they became a sponsor of Mackie Kepp. They aren't currently I think they might come back. I don't know. I can't remember, actually. But they certainly aren't currently. But because they were a sponsor, we, you know, we got accounts. They gave us accounts and we tested them. And they very quickly became my favorite VPN. I really like the way they work. It's so smooth on my laptop when I'm traveling or my iPhone or whatever. Regardless of any sponsorship, they are by far my favorite right now. And I checked when I was answering the email, the old sponsorship URL of Express VPN dot com slash MGG still works to get you. I think it's a three month bonus on your plan. So I don't know when they're going to shut that off, if they're going to shut that off. But feel free to use it doesn't, you know, it's all good. One thing to note, if you're looking to hide just your browsing activity and truly want to be as secure as we know how to be, Tor browser might very well be your best bet. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes, too. What Tor browser does is it connects to a network of what's the right way to say this of computers that it your so here's here's the way it works. There is this this network of computers out there and you can participate in this if you want to. But running the tour browser doesn't cause you to like be a host or an endpoint or something on the network. But what will happen is you connect to this tour network. The browser will do this automatically for you. It all happens within the browser. So you don't have to mess with your network settings or do anything. You connect to an entry point. That entry point connects to a second point. And the second point connects to an exit point. Each point only knows about the one hop before it. So the second point doesn't know who you are. It just knows where you entered. The exit point only knows the second point. It doesn't even know where you entered, let alone who you are. So now you've got this this detached series of nodes that get you to a website. And that website has no idea where you are or who you are or where you came from and can't even ask the one that it's coming from because that one doesn't know either because there's a minimum of three hops happening. So it's a little slower than browsing normally, as you might imagine, because you've got these multiple hops that everything's jumping through. But it works very, very well in terms of what it's supposed to do. And it's really not terribly slow. In fact, the new version of the Tor browser for the Mac. I just downloaded it recently again. It's it had been a couple of years since I messed with it. And man, it's great. It runs on Firefox. But remember, it's it's only if you're running the Tor browser, it's only hiding your browsing activity. It's not hiding any of your email or anything else. So if you click on an email link or something and go send an email from that, well, then they'll know who you were. Or if you click on something that launches some other app that's going to connect direct to the Internet, it's just going to connect to direct to the Internet. So it's only your browsing activity. There is an operating system you could run on your Mac called Tales that hides everything in its entirety. But that gets a little more complex. But but yeah, I don't know. What do you think, John, about all this? I think you answered the question very well. So it provides a number of things. So one, it provides a VPN can provide security and then encrypts your traffic. Right. It may be important if it's not already encrypted. Number two, it can provide location obfuscation. I'll go with that. You like that? Hey, that rhymes, too. And then it can hide where you're coming from, which depending on where you are and what you're doing, that may be important as well. Sure, sure. Yeah, right. Yeah. But yeah, and TunnelBear, I mean, I use them. I think you use them, you know, that they're a dandy choice. They're fine, too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I got a bunch of them. I mean, I use multiple ones. But normally when I'm out and about, I'm really not. Well, you know, actually, I think I told you this one time. So a lot of places locally offer free Wi-Fi. Sure. And apparently our local grocery store installed a new security system. And so I tried to go to a website. You know, when I was connected to the Wi-Fi, I wanted to go to the Connecticut Lottery website. They sell tickets for the Connecticut Lottery. Sure. It blocked me. Came up with like Cisco, whatever. You know, we're not going to let you go here because it's a gambling site. And I think they tie into open DNS. And I'm like, well, huh? The thing is, once I activated a VPN, no problem. Right. Right. And then it got through the content filter that they had if I just connected directly to their free Wi-Fi. So that may be another reason you'd like to use a VPN is to get through ridiculous limitations like this. So there's another way the current version of Firefox. And I think I think the current version is 67. This feature goes back to version 63. So relatively recently added is a feature that Firefox calls DNS over HTTPS. So even if your web browsing is like even if you're browsing to encrypted sites, your DNS lookups, if you're not on a VPN, if you are on a VPN, as John pointed out, that that sort of happens in a different way. But if you're just on a regular network, your DNS lookups are all in the clear. And as you found, John, can be filtered, right? Because the network can know, oh, you're trying to go to this site. That matches a list. And we're going to say, no, Firefox supports something called DNS over HTTPS, where instead of the browser asking the operating system, hey, go do this lookup via the insecure channels, it does its own DNS lookups direct to by default, it uses Cloud Flare servers and Cloud Flare has a HTTPS endpoint for DNS. And so it just connects just like you're connecting to a secure server. You know, the no one would know any different, but this particular connection does your DNS lookup and then sends you to wherever you need to go. So it's not on by default in Firefox. You can go turn it on in the network settings. But it will monkey with things. It is it will completely bypass many, but not all parental controls. It will potentially screw up your location based DNS for things like Netflix and YouTube. So you may not want to be using this. In fact, for that reason, you may not want to be using anything other than your ISPs DNS because you might want location based stuff for Netflix and YouTube and that sort of thing. But but in general, yeah, if you if you need some security Firefox, only for the Mac, well, in Windows and probably Android, but not iOS because I don't think they allow that to happen. So. Ah, right. DN. Oh, thank you, Stephen. Stephen, twenty three in our chat room at mackeygab.com slash stream was thinking ahead of me. DNS over HTTPS is available for iOS with Cloud Flare's one dot one dot one dot one app. So we will put that in the show notes, which is that is exactly what it does is it does all your DNS lookups over HTTPS. So I will put that in the show notes, too. Thank you, Stephen. This is awesome. I love it when all this stuff just happens. It's good. Sweet indeed. Yeah. Oh, man, we get all kinds of stuff to go through here. I want to. Well, let's let's answer Bill's question quickly. It's on the agenda, we might as well. Bill says this question isn't about the Mac in all your headphone experiences. Is there such a thing as a pair of good in ear noise canceling earphones that you can recommend? A bonus would be wireless, but I don't want to push my luck. Anything you can recommend would be most helpful. Yeah. So the thing to remember about earbuds is that many, but not all and AirPods would be a notable exception here. Many earbuds seal into your ear, right? Meaning they they block out a good deal of external noise usually somewhere between 25 and 30 decibels if the seal is proper. That's a lot, a ton. So that might actually be enough for you. But if it's not and you want what Bill wants, there are two. I will answer the first question or both questions first, and that's the new or well, relatively new ear in M twos from E a R I N dot com. They are out of stock of them. We mentioned them a couple of weeks ago and you folks pointed out they're out of stock, but those do have noise cancellation in them. They also allow you to use the microphones to let sound from the outside in if you want to hear external noise, but you can turn it off and you can control it. So the ear ends, I think they're about 250 bucks, but they are truly wireless, no cables or anything. They just their buds kind of like air pods, but they're even smaller. They just go in your ear and you're done. So that's that's one option that I have used and happily recommend. And then another option that I have also used and happily recommend are the Pioneer raise earphones are a YZ. These are wired. They have a lightning connector on them, which can be really handy to just plug directly into your phone. And they, too, have not only do they seal into your ear, but they also have ambient noise cancellation to really, really kind of make things quiet. I love these on an airplane, too, because they just kind of tune everything out. It's really nice. So so those are my two my two recommendations. And those are 99 bucks and they're not out of stock. So, you know, two thumbs up. They even have a little charging port along the cable so you can plug a lightning charger into it and charge your phone while you're listening and or your iPad, you know, whatever it is, as long as your iPad's lightning and not USB-C, because if it's USB-C, then the rays with their lightning cable don't work. Any thoughts on that, John, before we before we move on? No. OK, cool. I'm going to take this opportunity to talk about our next sponsor here, which is Captera at capterra.com slash MGG. That's C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A dot com slash M-G-G. We all like to be that person that tries things, right? You know, it's fun, right? We talk about new apps here on the show all the time. Cool stuff found exists because of that. But sometimes you don't want to be the person testing things out. You want to hear about what's actually worked for someone else, especially when you're looking for software for, say, your business, right? That's what Captera has. They have thousands, in fact, over 850,000 reviews of products from real software users. Somebody else has already done the testing and they've come and reviewed it so that you know when you're picking something out exactly what people think about it. And that's awesome because that way you know you're getting something. You're not wasting your time with something that's not going to work for you. They've got more than 700 specific categories of software, everything from project management to email marketing to, you know, business management, whatever you need. Go to Captera because it's free. Go to Captera.com, C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A.com slash M-G-G and you get to use this. It's free. It's a resource to find the best software solutions for your business and it's free. Why would you not want to go there? That's really the question. Maybe there needs to be a review about people like that because you're not like that. Go to Captera.com, C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A.com slash M-G-G software selection simplified. Our thanks to Captera for sponsoring this episode. OK, now let's why don't you take us to David, John? I think he's got a good. We're going to get we're going to get into the bits here. OK, and it's not going to be pretty. All right, but that's what we like. I think that is kind of how it works. So anyways, David writes, I was listening to Mackie Gab 767 when y'all know we don't really say that up here in the. Oh, no, we do now. Yanks don't know because we do. Yeah, because you guys, even though it like you guys, y'all and y'all and you guys are or if you get closer to New York and New Jersey, it's used guys. But the used guys has is a term that is rooted in a specific gender, even though it is usually not meant that way. So actually, a lot of people around here and a lot of school teachers around here have just started saying y'all instead of, hey, you guys, y'all know, it's it's it makes sense. I get it. It's fine. Yeah. But so we all were discussing 32 bit apps. And I mentioned that I noticed that ScanSnap, otherwise known as ScanSnap Manager, is 32 bit. I've noticed, but was also hesitant to move to their new 64 64 bit software, which is called ScanSnap Home. My wife is the one that does all the scanning. And if I broke that, I'd be in the doghouse. All right. Well, that's not good. Hope it's a nice doghouse. Let's not let's hope we can help him find it. Yeah. But did you have any issues converting to home? Did you convert to home? What was your process to move from ScanSnap Manager to ScanSnap Home? And here's the answer. So first, if you go their global download site, you will then be presented with a dialogue saying, hey, what's your scanner? Now, what's your operating system? And so I click on those. Hang on one second, John, I hate to interrupt you, but I must. What happened was we started getting this really staticky audio and and so I stopped things. I thought it was just in my ears, but it turns out it was not. I didn't want to reboot the computer because I would lose all my my time tracking and everything. And plus just it takes time. I went into audio MIDI setup and I grabbed the Firewire control or the bit rate control for the Firewire mixer and I changed it from forty four point one to forty eight K and that reset the audio subsystem and everything was fine. And then I set it back to forty four point one and here we are. So there we are. So I don't know where we lost you in this, John, but you want to tell us about ScanSnap? I heard let me let me get to let me get to this here. Well, I think you got the problem description, the problem description for sure. Yes, that that he had a thirty two bit app and you were you. I heard you sending him to the Fujitsu website to potentially download a new version. Is that right? Correct. OK. So the thing is, so there's a URL. Yep. And basically, if you go there, that's their global download site. So you indicate what scanner you have, what S you have, and then say display software list and then it gives you a list of the software. Sure. The nice thing is that they explain. All right. By the way, as you probably heard, Apple is not going to allow thirty two bit apps in their upcoming OS. So we got this new thing instead of it being called ScanSnap Manager. They have a new thing called ScanSnap Home, which is sixty four bit for the most part. And I'll get to that later. Nice. So and the other thing, so they say so they tell you this. They also say, all right, if you install this home software, if we find the old stuff, we're going to delete it, which to me is actually a good thing and that you're cleaning out your old garbage and throwing it away. Yeah, for sure. What they claim to do when I ran it, you know, we had a question how to work for you and it worked great for me. That's great. So the thing is you may not want to dive right in here. So as with any software, you know, especially going through bit difference migrations and stuff like this here, I would probably not and not do this on your primary volume because what if what if you lose something and then you're going to be in the doghouse, as you said, and nobody wants to be in the doghouse, unless it's a nice doghouse. I mean, we got some pretty fancy doghouses in these parts, but they're not as nice as our houses. It's not it's not how it is. I did want to go ahead. All right. So the thing is I would suggest to eat to make at the very least a backup and then maybe you want to try the migration. You could also make a clone. And the thing is if the new software doesn't do what you need, then maintain a Mojave or a Mojave VM in order to run the old software. Though, you know, I don't really like that solution because the thing is you're relying on stuff that's not going to be updated and it can have all sorts of problems and stuff. So so I hope that works. And the response from David was I'm installing Mojave on an external disk to test it over the long holiday weekend. So I hope that test worked out and I'm sure David will get back to us and let us know. Perfect. But now here's the weird thing, Dave, I've seen this. Now, I think we talked about this app called Go 64. Yes. Yes. And the interesting thing is that looking at ScanSnap Home, which I upgraded to it has a warning. Saying one of the components is not 64 bit. Yeah, I can't remember. Did we talk about Go 64 last week in the show? I I don't know that we did. I don't think it was out yet. So Go 64 is an app from St. Clair Software, which are the folks that make app tamer and default folder and lots of other utilities that we know and love. Go 64 is a free app and it will scan all of your applications and not just look on the surface for whether the app reports that it is 64 bit or 32 bit, but it will also go deep and look at every component inside of an app's package because there might be lots of little things that come along with an app that are just different bits and pieces of code. And it will tell you if something inside the app is 32 bit while the app itself might be 64. iMovie is a great example. There is a component of iMovie that is 32 bit. But iMovie in general is 64 and will likely run unless it needs that one little component, which hopefully it doesn't. And it sounds like maybe this scan snap home has a similar situation going on. Is that right? Yes, and the app explicitly says app is 64 bit except for SS create marker PDF, which is some component. And if you click on more info, I think he gives you the path to it and stuff like that. So. Yeah, so it's very deep within the system, but. I guess the message is, you know, if we didn't explicitly go into detail about. This app, this is a good way to figure out what needs updating. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And people that have maybe not. So it sounds like they didn't entirely migrate it because there's this one component. Will it work, though? And, you know, to me, that's a headscratcher because Apple, when they forced. Things like this, they typically make exceptions. Oh, there's no exception. 32 bit code will not run in Carolina. I mean, that's not. OK, yeah, it's not a. Because I've seen them do it in the past where they they'd have a list of exceptions saying, OK, well, we really want you to run 64 bit. But there's these legacy components that, you know, we'll let it slide. But I guess they're probably finally putting their foot down. Yeah, they're past that. Yeah, yeah, no, no. OK, so there's no grace period now. It's like everything has to be 64 bit. Correct. 32 bit. OK, correct. Yeah, but but the apps will run. It's just if they need that one little component that that piece won't run. Hopefully that component is only needed for people that are running on 32 bit systems and then everything is fine. So which is which is often the case. They may have written whatever that component does may only have been written in 64 bit code in the, you know, in the app proper. And so there's this other little component for somebody that's running on a non 64 bit. And I don't know. I don't know. Like, yeah, I'm just I'm OK. Yeah, but this is not unheard of on other platforms as well as you may have to maintain a older VM or operating system to run legacy software. That's just the way it is. Total or you just need to find another way around it. We talked in last week 768 about my my printer, my laser jet 3055. It's an all in one laser printer. And there are no drivers from HP for it that are new enough to have even been conceived after 64 bit, let alone written that way. So I heard from many of you, Tom being one of them. He says, I thought I'd remind you of a program out there by Hamrick software called ViewScan. According to their website, they reverse engineer older scanner drivers so that you can use old scanners that are no longer supported. And one of the things that they really go after is these 32 bit scanners with 32 bit drivers and they reverse engineer these. Unfortunately for dear old Dave, they have only reverse engineered the laser jet 3055 for Windows and not for Mac OS. So it's a great idea. And I wanted to share it in the show in case there's someone else out there that has this but not for me, sadly. So, right. Well, there's your solution. So you just run a Windows VM to I could. Yeah, I could. Other people have recommended, you know, some printers mind of course doesn't fit into this realm but some printers have SD card slots that you can scan directly to on the scanner, you know, slash printer. And then you take, then it doesn't matter then you don't need drivers. You just plug the SD card into your Mac and you're, you know, you're good to go. So that would be another way to do it. But again, not for dear old Dave. The third way is if your printer is like mine a network printer but also has a USB port it's possible that, you know, something even like image capture might work over the USB port even though it doesn't work over the network. So my printer, the way my office is set up is nowhere near a Mac of any kind. So I think I'm just gonna have to bite the bullet and get a new scanner. And maybe that means getting a new all in one printer or maybe it just means getting a new scanner or maybe it means using the crummy scanner that we have on the inkjet all in one over at the house because how often do I scan? Realistically, it's once a year for our tax returns. So I might be able to live without, you know, a great scanner, but we'll see. But thank you everybody for your thoughts and ideas. Because ViewScan is a great piece of software and really does solve this for many, many scenarios. Just of course not mine, but that's all right, you know. Andrew, in relation to last week's show, had a piece of advice for us. He says, I have a strong suggestion for a remote sharing app and it's Zoom, found at zoom.us. It takes a bit of time to set up and learn, but it is fantastic for sharing screens and you can record on either side, which can be really helpful if you're showing someone how to do something or whatever they can record and play it back and all that, which is great. He says, it's especially good at helping you get the audio devices working on both sides, which is not always easy with tools like Skype. Plus it's free when used for one-on-one meetings for any session length, unlike TeamViewer. He says also one or both of the people can be on a phone or tablet, which makes it useful for helping people with their iOS devices. He says, I find it's best though for when someone needs help on a desktop device because I was not able to enable true screen sharing on my iPhone like I could with a desktop, but I was able to share images from my camera roll and anything I could bring up on my phone's browser, I could even share and annotate. So thank you for that. That's good to know. I always forget about Zoom for help like that. I've used it for conferencing stuff when people are... It's a video conferencing app, but obviously it does screen sharing, so they don't dictate what the content of the conference needs to be, so there you go, right? And a different Andrew, believe it or not, had a response to the same scenario. He said, I too got kicked off of TeamViewer even though I was only using it for my two children and one senior citizen. I tried parallels access, but that was kind of janky. I tried Apple's inbuilt screen sharing and it was cool, but that needed someone on the other end. He said, I've since found realVNC. Why is this good? You don't need someone at the other end and it is free for up to five people and you can donate five bucks a year if you like to cover their server costs. They offer an enterprise version as well. You put realVNC server on each remote machine and then you put the client on your Mac, iPad and iPhone. That's all at realVNC.com and I checked with Andrew on this. You don't need to, it takes care of poking all the holes in your firewalls in order to make all this stuff work so you don't need to worry about any of that. So realVNC sounds like it might be the answer for folks that need to do this, especially remotely and on a regular basis. So thank you for all of that. Good stuff, right, Mr. Braun? Sure, I think I have it, I haven't installed it somewhere. I've used it in the past, it's been a long time. It sounds like it's gotten a lot more robust based on what he just described, at least from what I remember, which is good. Okay, Bruce has a tip for us, which is really weird. He says, in episode 760, Neil wrote in about problems he was having with USB drives disconnecting. I believe the first item to check should be the USB hub. Here's why I say this. I recently experienced a similar situation where my Gen3 Drobo would suddenly disappear and then come back online. It sounded very similar to what Neil was talking about. The Drobo was plugged directly into a USB port on my Mac. So let's remember this, plugged directly in, Drobo, Mac, cable, that's it. He says, I was also having problems with drives that were connected to a 10 port USB3 hub. The system had just come back from Apple where they set it off for depot maintenance due to problems with intermittent kernel faults. While at Apple, they swapped out the entire logic board, all the internal cabling, et cetera. Basically, everything was swapped out except the dual graphics cards. Once I got the system back, I reinstalled my two terabyte SSD from OWC and I have an OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock. So I attached that to using Apple's Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter. I moved the Drobo and the other affected USB drives to the OWC dock. So there was almost nothing attached to this hub, but the problem persisted. At that point, I drove to my nearby computer store and purchased a new USB3 hub, different brand, and used it to replace what I was thinking was a questionable hub. All of my problems disappeared, including the issues with the direct connected Drobo. I was able to move all the USB devices back to their original configuration and remove the OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock. The system is now running properly. In summary, the failing USB hub was able to affect USB devices that were not connected through the hub. It didn't matter what USB controller the disk drives were connected to, as long as the failing hub was connected to my Mac, I continued to have problems with USB. So this changes everything about troubleshooting. I've never experienced this, but I totally believe Bruce, obviously. So it's worth bearing in mind that a USB hub can impact things that aren't connected through a USB hub. It can impact other USB things, which is great. So glad to hear it. Thoughts on that, John? It's a problem when you're riding on the bus. Yeah, it is. You got a bad player on the bus and it ruins it for everybody, right? I mean, not only for computers, but in real life, Dave, right? Yes, in real life, too. I mean, you're on the bus and you got one person that's a problem. It just ruins everybody's day. It's a problem. Yeah. I'm being serious here. No, yeah, I'm with you. These power issues can propagate throughout the entire USB bus, which kind of makes sense, I guess. I guess, yeah. I mean, a fun place to look to see if there were any signs that this was happening is that if you run our PAL system information and then go to hardware and USB, you will get more than enough information about the current requirements and the speeds and extra operating current and all this weird stuff. And maybe something will come up there. And in theory, I think we got a note about this from in the past, but sometimes you will get a warning from the operating system saying, hey, this guy needs too much juice. I can't do it over USB because it's coded into the hardware as far as the... And you would assume that the computer would make the right measurement and say, but sometimes it doesn't. Yeah, yeah. I wonder if it was a power issue with that hub or if it was that the hub was like sending noise across the signal. Oh, it could be USB 3 wackiness, right? Yeah, or just, I mean, if the hub was sending bad data of noisy, if it had a noisy connection or something, like, you know, I don't know, yeah. I had, remember last week, I think it was last week, maybe it was two weeks ago, where I was saying that my... Oh, I think it was last week. I was saying that at the moment, my Mocha adapters weren't working in the house and I had to use the... Or Iroh kicked in and did wireless backhaul because there was no wired backhaul because the Mocha adapters weren't working. Well, I went through it after we recorded the show and turned things on and turned things off and couldn't figure it out. I even swapped out Mocha adapters and it would, like, there was one location where Mocha adapters wouldn't work. It didn't matter what the adapter was. Like, okay, that's weird. And finally, I went down into my ground floor where the cable comes into the house and I unscrewed the inbound cable, which then goes into a point of entry filter, which is what's used for Mocha and then that goes into a surge protector and then that goes into a splitter. Well, I unscrewed the cable coming into the house and I screwed it back in and the problems went away. So something was holding some kind of a charge maybe, I mean, this is all passive electronics at this point, but something was holding a charge that was maybe sending too much noise through the signal. I don't know. I'm thinking my point of entry filter was not functioning properly. But why and why removing it from the system and putting it back in, everything worked. Who knows? Who knows? I know. So that's the thing is, you know. My guess would have been, it's Puck. Yeah, I thought it was Puck. I mean, Puck killed the Wi-Fi so Puck could also kill the cable, right? Yeah. Hasn't he done that? He killed the Wi-Fi several times once while we were recording this show, yeah. Puck is Dave's adorable cat, by the way. He is quite adorable. He's a star. He is. He is Puck the star on Instagram. Yeah. Anyway, he's got more followers than I do. So that's, I don't know. Are you kidding me? I know. I'm not kidding. He's got like 2,000 followers or something on Instagram. What? Yeah, what's he at now? Let me look. Oh, he dropped. He's at 1791. So maybe after this episode we can push Puck over the 1,800 mark or maybe for... You don't have that many followers? Come on. You have more than me. I think I have like 3K or something. Instagram? I have like 1,000. Oh, no, no, no. I'm sorry, I'm on Twitter. Yeah. All right, yeah, yeah. While we're talking about USB and we will go back to talking about USB, Pat wrote in and said, have either of you run across a USB-C hub that has four or six or eight ports? All I can find is a USB-C hub that goes to USB, you know, a USB-A, yeah, and then has lots of ports, but there's no hubs with lots of USB-C ports. And I've noticed this. I've had this conversation with a couple of people lately, like why this doesn't exist. And I posted it on Twitter earlier today, and at least as of the time when we recorded the show, nobody had a great answer as to why. Some speculation was, well, there might be confusion between, you know, Thunderbolt and USB-C, but it's like, well, but that's not a, it's like, no, that's not the reason. Yes, there might be some of that confusion, but that's not the reason. If somebody needed that product, somebody would build it. So I feel like one thought was people are expecting power to go over USB-C. And again, like, yes, if you're saying power delivery, but otherwise, no, I think it's that there's not enough demand for it is really what it comes down to. It's just, you know, we don't have lots of USB-C only peripherals. We just use USB-C as sort of the bridge to get to whatever we need to get to, right? So I think they will come, but if I'm wrong about this, I'd love to know what I'm wrong about. You know who would know? Larry. Oh, at OWC? I think he would have an informed perspective on this. Yeah. If anybody would offer this, if there was demand, it would be OWC, right? Correct. I'll ask Larry. That's brilliant, man. I'll ask Larry. That's a great idea. No, seriously, that's great. That's great. All right. Two quick tips, and then we got some cool stuff found to go through. So I'll make the quick tips quick because that's what we do. Yeah. Although I think the first one isn't entirely quick. Pat says, I think it's the same Pat. Might not be, though. I've learned a lesson. I'm Uberloaded with copies of copies of files and folders and libraries and such from failure throughout the last few years since the mid-80s. I've been trying to squeeze and maneuver these files and folders by just putting them away and maybe later I'll organize them. Well, the time has come. My error of all errors and my source of frustration has been trying to do everything using hard drives that are too small. He's been using older drives. He says, I've been using everything from an old 600 gig drive to a 10 terabyte Seagate. And he says, so, since my photos is largest, then music, then all else, I have ordered two 16 terabyte Seagate Exos Pro drives that have five year warranties from Amazon and I'm gonna set them in a RAID mirror. And I'm gonna put my photos on there alone unless there's also room for music and then I'll do that too. All else will be on two 10 terabyte Pro drives also in a mirror. And he says, don't make my mistake. So the mistake that he made was using old drives that were sort of decommissioned from their main purpose for his archival storage and never really kind of thinking about what's the safe way to save his data, right? And that, it's a fair point. You can try and do things inexpensively with like extra hardware laying around or whatever, but it may not be the safest way to save your data, especially if it's data that you care about saving. And when you start to kind of zoom out and think about it a little bit, using a couple of drives in a RAID mirror, it's really not that expensive to put that together and you get some fault tolerance and you get reliability and all of that stuff and your headaches go away. So yeah, I get it and it's a good lesson. So thank you, Pat, very good stuff. What do you think about that, John, before we go to the second quick tip? It's a big problem. It is? Yeah, yeah. Well, especially within the context of how do you store your valuable documents and stuff? How do you store it in a way that makes sense? Yeah, NAS drive is good. We could have a whole, but I'm not just talking about data integrity. Right. But I'm also talking about just the strategy in general. I mean, Apple programs make it easy. You know, your photos, well, hey, if you use photos, then that's great because everything's there. If you use Creative Cloud or something like that, but when it comes to storing and finding other types of documents from the past, like you said, you scan your tax returns, right? What's your strategy in that? But my personal one is within my documents folder I have a tax return folder. And then within that, I have the PDFs of all of them. But I think that's an equally important question, not only preserving your data, but how do you even organize it? Yeah. I think, I mean, Apple kind of helps a bit in that they provide you a structure. Apple helps a lot, I think. I mean, if you put all your things in the right places, it makes it a lot nicer to find it and get at it when you need it. Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's right. Instead of just like throwing it like, is it on that drive, is it on this drive? Having a place, like he's gonna have a place for his photos and then a place for everything else. And he's spending a little bit of money, but really not that much. And he's able to rate it all together, which you can do with disc utility, or you can go and buy something like Softrade. If you want a little more control. But yeah, yeah, I like it. There's, and or you could sort of offload all of that headache to the management software inside, say, you know, a Synology or something, a NAS drive where, you know, it takes care of sort of managing the discs and you just put your data out there. It's not a bad thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, and we have a tip from a very different Patrick. I promise this one is not the same Pat, even though there were two in a row. Actually, I think it's three different paths. I'm sure this has been around forever, but I just found it now and I love it, he says. As an MGG listener, I should know better and not open 20 to 30 tabs in Safari, but I find myself in this position all the time. Same, Patrick. What I hate, he says, is that when tabs extend beyond the length of the window, and I have to click one by one to find the tab that I want, my daily computer is a 2013 15-inch MacBook Pro that I use exclusively with the trackpad. It turns out that with two fingers on the trackpad, putting the mouse cursor over the tab bar, you can scroll or swipe two fingers left or right to scroll through the tabs effortlessly. I had no idea, he says. Patrick, yeah, you found the secret. This is the only way to manage tabs and it's great. And this is like the epitome of Quick Tips because it's the thing that once you know how to do it, you do it all the time and then you forget that other people might not know, just like you didn't know and then you don't share it as a Quick Tip and I'm so happy you shared this, Patrick, because it's a great Quick Tip. Just position your mouse cursor over the tab bar, swipe with two fingers on the trackpad, either way and boom, the tabs will expand and fluidly float back and forth and you can see what the heck you're doing. So, very good stuff, thank you, Patrick. Good little Quick Tip. All right, we have some cool stuff found to go through but the first thing I wanna do before we do that is I wanna talk about BBEdit from Barebone Software, our next sponsor here because man, without BBEdit, I don't know what I would do and here's a really cool thing. BBEdit is now back in the Mac App Store with subscriptions available, which is a new App Store-only model. So, very cool, you can just go to the App Store, get your subscription to BBEdit and you are good to go. If you want a perpetual license, you can do that. Just go to Barebones.com and you can get them direct from Barebones and other resellers and last but not least, actually, really, there's two things. You can go to Barebones.com and download a 30-day trial of BBEdit. Here's the even cooler part. When that trial ends, some features go away but you get to keep using BBEdit and for a lot of you, that might be all you need. So go to Barebones.com and get your trial of BBEdit. Check it all out for 30 days and then when it scales back, check that out too. Make your decision whether you need a subscription or you wanna buy a perpetual license and because you're so happy, being a BBEdit user, go to merch.barebones.com and you can get cool BBEdit merch just like John and I have. You've got to check it all out. Starts at barebones.com, go there. Our thanks to the folks at Barebones for sponsoring this episode. John, you have some cool stuff found. Yes, I do. So it's fun to go to your local warehouse store every now and then and we have one called BJs in my area. You know, it's like a Costco or other thing. So I was walking through and all of a sudden in one of the aisles, I noticed this, they had a whole bunch of smart home stuff that I've never heard of before. And one of them, now if you recall, Dave, a while ago I got a product from a vendor that was a AC control and it would basically mimic the IR controls that most ACs have, right? Yeah, the Tato or whatever it was, right? Yeah, yeah, and then all of a sudden they decided they're like, oh, by the way, we're gonna decide not to support remotes that don't have an LCD display and I'm like, what? Right. And so they like killed support for it. And I'm like, you know, that probably wasn't one of the greatest moments in customer service history. Probably not, yeah. I mean, the thing is they sent me an email saying, hey, we'll refund your money. And it's like, well, you gave it to me for review. So you don't have to do that. Yeah, please don't send me any money, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, well, I... But anyways, I'm an ethical type of guy. I'm not gonna ask for a refund on something I didn't pay for. Sure. So I'm going through the store and all of a sudden I see this product, among all the other, they had like smart plugs and stuff, but they had one called a smart AC adapter, I believe, let me... Okay. Look at their page up in a moment. I'll pull it up, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you have it already. But anyways, so I'm like, oh, well, that's cool. And it was 30 bucks. So I'm like, okay, I'll try one out. And it says it works with... Keep going. I'll finish and then I've got some questions. Go ahead. Sorry. So it said works with all ACs. So no limitation as far as the display. And they're like, yeah, we can control your AC. And I'm like, okay. And so, and I looked at the components and it's basically a wall socket adapter. And then it has a USB cable to an IR receiver transmitter. Okay. And I'm like, all right. So, you know, set it up and the only restriction, they're like, well, we only work with 2.4 gigahertz because my suspicion is that to keep the costs low, they're just using a 2.4 gigahertz wifi chipset. Sure. But that's fine. So, you know, I download their app, I set it up. It's like, okay, well, you know, press the buttons that correspond to these functions and the app said, yep, everything's great. And then it's like, okay, here we go. And they also have skills for the A lady and the G thing, but not the S thing. Yeah, well, yeah, no, it wouldn't be home kit compatible at that price, there's no way. Yeah. Right. But it does exactly what I need in that. So, the voice control is kind of limited. It just lets me say on and off, but the app is pretty full featured in that I can basically remotely press any of the buttons. So, you know, it's a cloud-based thing and I had to get an account and all that stuff. But here's the cool part. I'm like, well, why did they architect it this way? Dude, it has a power meter. So, it shows me the voltage and the amperage at the AC and has a little graph. So, it shows me how many kilowatt hours I consumed with a particular AC. Okay, so you have to plug your AC in through this. So, this only works for AC-based air conditioners. Yes. It would not work for me where I've got like a mini-split system that just plugged into a circuit. Yeah, directly, not. Yeah, but it was, I mean, I just want to control. Yeah. And it also shows the temperature and it's actually not quite accurate, which is not unusual for low-cost things with a thermal. That's pretty cool. But no, I was totally thrilled. And yeah, so I can, you know, say turn it on, turn it off, and it shows me the power consumption, which that... That's pretty cool, man. That actually really kind of thrilled me. And then, you know, hats off to BJs. I went back like two days later and they had an e-coupon for 10 bucks off and I'm like, well, I just bought one and I want another because I have two ACs. I'm like, can you like, you know, throw me the 10 bucks? Like, rather than me returning, and they're like, yeah, here's a gift card for 10 bucks. Oh, that's good. Oh, thanks, that's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they were nice about that, but the funny thing is Dave, is that you and I did a bit of research, I'd never heard of these guys. I don't know who... Yeah, it's one of these, you know, brand new kind of companies. It happens all the time, right? I mean, we see... No, it's just funny is that I saw this, you know, rack of products and, you know, they say, well, we've been in business for like 20 years and here's our stuff. So I'm curious as to their background. Right. Right. But the product work great. Yeah. So check them out. But it's nice to be able to control. But I missed being able to control my AC. Or being able to, you know, turn it on when, you know, like, you know, wouldn't you like your house to be cool before you get home? Well, with this, you can do that. Yeah, yeah, I would love to find a way to those Tato things wouldn't work with my AC either. Yeah, it's just the way the remotes work. It just wasn't compatible. And it would be really nice to have something that would, you know, that would do that. My guess is, I mean, it's just remote control for me. So I could probably rig something up, but I just haven't gone that far yet. So yeah, pretty good. All right, a couple more cool stuff found that I think we have time for here. Greg tells us about something that he calls or that is called lights off. This is, I just upgraded to Mac OS Mojave 10.14.5 while I instantly fell in love with the dark mode feature. There are a couple of apps that I still wanted to stay light. And I found lights off, which is a simple menu bar app that lets you quickly switch between light and dark mode and specify what mode you want to be in on a per app basis. And he gave us a link for it, which of course we will put in the show notes. And this is great. Thank you, Greg. I've been using an app, which I think I mentioned on the show in the past called Night Owl to do exactly the same thing. It allows me to control when or whether dark mode is on and also lets me exempt apps so that some apps are never in dark mode, which is for some things like busy cal, at least the way I have busy cal set up, I do not like dark mode in it. So it never goes dark mode. And then everything's fine. Everybody's happy. Thank you so much for that, Greg. Good stuff. We love the cool stuff found. Andrew has a cool stuff found for us. It kind of fits with our previous discussion. He says, for years I had been doing a daily backup using carbon copy cloner to a rotational drive at one terabyte to Sheba. In the times that I had to boot from it, it got me there, but it was slow. So I had my eyes on an SSD and I found a Samsung T5 SSD at Best Buy. It's $90 US, he says, for 500 gigs. That's pretty good. And he says, four things. Now my daily clone is totally usable and bootable as a day-to-day drive if necessary. My daily backup of 10 gigs at 2 a.m. went from being a 30 minute operation to a 10 minute operation. And the T5 has a faster write speed than the one terabyte Fusion drive inside my iMac. And it comes with two cables, USB-C to USB-C and USB-A to USB-C. So he says it comes in 250 gig, 500, one terabyte and two terabyte. Says I'm getting rid of my spindle drives and replacing them with these. This is a really important thing. I was having a conversation, actually I think with John Martellaro here at Mac Observer about it. And it's true, the operating systems that we're running now, basically High Sierra and Forward are all really engineered to be run from an SSD. Sure, they can run from a rotational drive, but they're not optimized for that. And when you go to boot your clone, if you're saving your clone to a standard rotational drive, you will experience this. And that can really be a problem if you need to run from your clone for any length of time. So considering moving your clones to SSDs would make a difference. For your long-term archival storage, things like that, the photos that Pat was talking about before, that's fine on rotational drives. But for the drive you boot from, you want an SSD and you want that with your clone too. This is, and thankfully they've come down in price enough that you can sort of afford. This is an external drive. It's got a USB-C port on it. And like he said, it comes with cables so you can plug it into a USB-C or a USB-A-based Mac, which is great. So thank you for that, Andrew. It's good stuff and it's smart and smart. It's the way to go. It is. I'm set up that way. So in both my MacBook Pro and my Mac Mini, I have a crucial one terabyte SSD. And then for my backup, they had a deal through, I think it was Amazon or something, I got a one terabyte external sand disk in an enclosure to do my backup. So I'm all SSD, baby. Yeah. Well, except for my NAS. Yeah, yeah. But you don't, well, I mean, the thing is, you know, your NAS is connected to gigabit ethernet, right? If you've got like three or more drives in your NAS, you can probably, your NAS can probably go faster, way faster than your gigabit ethernet can go. So like, you know, I mean, most, most synologies these days are rated above 200 megabytes a second. Right. Right. Because it pulls the, yeah, pulls the drive. So yeah. Right. It's reading and writing from multiple drives simultaneously. So I routinely am finding that the bottleneck in transferring data is not my Synology's drives. It's either ethernet or the drives in my Mac. You know, I mean, even if you're Mac, in my MacBook Air will do, I don't know, it's crazy. It's, you know, it's like hundreds of megabytes a second or something. It's just, it's nuts, right? And, or maybe more than that, thousands actually. But, but, you know, that's only for big files, you know, where you're sustained write and sustained read. When you're doing lots of little files, you're lucky to get, you know, a 10th of that. But, but it's interesting to see, well, actually, I mean, you know, our friends at Synology, they're looking towards the future. I mean, they have a, is it the FS series, I think, that are all SSD? It's like, hey, you want an array with SSDs? You can pay for it. I think it's still a bit pricier. Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. I mean, you're not gonna get, you still, I think, get the most bang for the buck with performance rotational drives than SSDs, but. Absolutely. You know, that's changing, right? No, I don't think that's changing, to be honest. I think that will remain a truth for a long time. The prices of everything is coming down so that, you know, the cost for an SSD, and we just talked about a 500 gig external for 90 bucks, like that, you know, if somebody three years ago was listening to this episode, they'd freak out, you know, that they think we misspoke. But no, you know, that's how it is. But rotational drives have gotten bigger and cheaper too. So I think rotational drives will continue to be cheaper. The question is, you know, what are you doing with them? The nice part about SSDs, you know, especially put them in a NAS, it's smaller, it can be a portable NAS, you can bring it to a job site and, you know, plug right in and you're good to go, you don't need, you know, it's lightweight, you can throw it in your suitcase, like that, there's benefits to it. You know, it's still, if it's got a gigabit ethernet port on it, it's still only gonna go at gigabit ethernet, you know, but I don't know if they're putting 10 gig ports on those NAS, those FS series NAS, but if they are, you know, then your computer needs one. But still, you know, it's quieter, which can be, which can really matter. And, you know, lightweight, smaller, which is good, yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty sure most of the vendors on their high end do have one or more 10 gig ports. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, does your computer have it? How are you coordinating that? I mean, you know, is it worth it, I guess, is the question and in some scenarios, of course, yeah, it is, yeah. All right, where are we on time? Let's see, do we have, Bob had kind of a question that leads to cool stuff found. He says, I recently found a few articles about iPhone apps talking to back, sending data about my location or my activities back to their home bases. He says, while I realized that we've all given up much of our privacy, I was surprised by the number of iOS apps committing what I would consider to be bad behavior. While I also realized that the makers of this app called Privacy Pro probably want some publicity for their product by participating in writing articles like these, do you think that Privacy Pro is an app that is worthwhile to install? I'm especially curious about the free version, which I realized doesn't give you a VPN. And we can, we'll put links to these articles in here, but it's true, Apple is not happy about this practice either and they are locking things down and removing apps and not approving apps that are doing things to send tracking data back. iOS 13 does a lot more in terms of telling you, hey, this app just asked for your location 13 times in the last 24 hours, are you sure you wanna continue to let it ask you? I had that, I'm running the beta on my iPad and it asked me that about a weather app and I was traveling, I was in different locations and I was like, yeah, okay, yes, I do, but it was really nice that it came and asked me that. So there is this app called Privacy Pro which it uses a VPN to see what data is being sent from your phone or where the data is being sent to it can't, if it's sent securely, obviously, it can't see what the data is, but it can see where the data is being sent to and can pull some heuristics about that. Interesting, I don't know. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. I haven't installed it on mine yet, but I plan to and see what kind of data it gathers. Yeah, I mean, they mentioned that they do, the thing we talked about before, which is the encryption of DNS lookups. Oh, okay. That's kind of interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I'm looking at all they do here. Yeah, yeah. Though it brings up an interesting point, the thing is Apple should, being the gatekeeper for all the apps with their tools that audit the code that's submitted, they should, in theory, be able to detect shenanigans. You know what I'm saying? They should. Like, here's a system call saying, connect to this website and send this data. It's like, okay, why are you doing this again? Yeah. I mean, it's pretty easy to get the, unless they obfuscate it. Or try to trick Apple in that they're hiding their attempt to phone home and send data back. You know what I'm saying? But apps phone the, I don't think it's as easy as you make it sound. And here's why. Oh, no, no, I agree because you could phone home for a valid reason. Correct. Or a malicious reason. The thing is, how do you know that by just inspecting the code? And you really can't. You can't. Unless you got really good tools. Right. But even if you do, like, I mean, you know, our Mac Geek app, which if you folks don't have it, go get it. It's free. But the Mac Geek app, it quote unquote, phones home to check the RSS feeds and then download episodes and all of these other things, right? But we're not, you know, tracking you when you do that. You know, we're just, but you are phoning home to our servers. So, you know, like how- I mean, there's an entry in a log somewhere, probably saying that you, right? Yeah. We could probably say, hey, you listened, you downloaded this episode. Yes. There would be an entry in the logs at cash fly that you downloaded the episode and an entry in the logs on our Mac Geek app server that you pulled down the IP address you had at the time pulled down the, you know, the RSS feed. Sure. But that's not personally identifiable. We don't log that in. We don't attach like your email address to that stuff. We don't send that out along with the request because we have no interest in knowing that data about you. That would be creepy. You know, we're just, we try not to be creepy. Right. We're not here twirling our mustache, you know, shortling it all the evil we can do with this data that we're collecting. Yeah, yeah. I don't even know what it would be. That we know. Tom downloaded the show. My goodness. Let's call him and ask him what he thought about it. That would be really weird, you know, like, I don't know, that'd be weird. We're never gonna call you directly and ask you what you- No, no. Because you know how to tell us what you think. Yes. When I already told you. Yes, right. We'd rather just respond to the feedback that you ask about as opposed to trying to be proactive about it. Hey, we noticed you might have a problem with your thing. You might want to do this. That'd be weird. That'd be weird. It might be helpful, but it'd be weird, so. Yeah. Well, we made it through the show with only one major, you know, glitch. But, you know, that's not so bad. Was it analog or was it digital, though? Oh, definitely digital. Because all I, what I did was I changed the bitrate in audio MIDI setup. Oh, right, right, right. Right? And then things got better. So I was like, yep, that's- So some audio subsystem was like reset? Yeah, that forces the system to be reset. That's exactly right. Okay. That's, yeah, it wasn't like changing the bitrate didn't mean anything. It was, that forces- Changing. Something. Correct. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yep, it's just turn it off, turn it on again kind of thing. Without turning it off, turn it on. That's when I said, you know, Alan in the chat room was telling me, turn it off, turn it on. I'm like, I don't want to. How do I just turn that one thing off and on? Aha, I know how to do that. And that's what that did. So, yeah, it's crazy, though. It's helpful. All right, folks. Well, hopefully you heard all of this episode and we didn't record this in vain. So, you know, there you go. Yeah. We do have backup recordings of various types. So, I'm sure you will be hearing this too far. I'm sure you've already heard this. That's, I'm certain of that by this point. No, it's weird. What are you saying? What are you talking about? It's time to get out of here. Is this some sort of temporal? Yeah, definitely is. Temporal anomalies. Speaking of temporal anomalies, vote for the Makike podcast awards here in July because that's, you know, it's at podcastawards.com. And we would love to have you vote for us in the technology and best of category. Why not? That's what we're asking. If you can, you don't have to, obviously. We're not going to know if you do or don't because we don't track you. But here's what we do. Oh, that's right. Don't tell me. No, they make them seem, it'll make us seem creepy and then they don't want to vote for us anymore. So, vote for us. We would love that. I mentioned CashFly during the show our thanks to CashFly at cachefly.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Of course, all of our sponsors, as we mentioned in the show, capterra.com slash mgglino.com slash mgglbearbones.com and then, of course, everybody in the podcast marketplace. Smile at SmileSoftware.com slash podcast of the world computing at maxsales.com Eero at Eero.com slash mggexperien.com slash mgg. Go do that. That's free. That's pretty cool. You control your credit rate. Like, who does that? That's a cool thing. You like it. It's a life hack. John, do you have any advice for me as I go through and try and edit this show so that people could have heard what we already said? I think it's going to be a rough... It's going to be a rough time for you, my friend, because you're going to have to go through all sorts of timestamps and audio. And the only thing I wish, Dave, is that when you put this episode together to make it coherent with the proper timestamps and all that thing, is that you don't get caught. Made up.