 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, Episode 709 for Monday, May 14th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, the show that takes your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, mixes them all together, strings together, a nice little narrative that we can walk through answering your questions, sharing your tips, sharing your cool stuff found with the goal being that we each, each learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Ring, where at ring.com slash mgg you can save up to 150 bucks off a ring of security kit like John and I have. Cross over from Code Weavers, where at code weavers.com slash mgg you get a 14-day free trial and then save 35% and happy 25th anniversary to BB Edit from Bare Bones. We'll talk more about that later too. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Critter Infested, Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. The John F. Braun? Well, that's why I put the F in there because there are many John Brawns. I think there's only one John F. Braun. As far as you're aware, as far as you're concerned, I like that. Well, also when I want to search for stuff that I've worked on, it makes it a lot easier to differentiate and find what I've done. This was a preconceived Google hack so that you could easily find yourself online. Isn't that what we're all trying to do? Finding ourselves online or off? Well, I think in your case, though, the problem is for a while there, when you went to the airport, they found the wrong Dave Hamilton. That is true, my friend. If you would use the differentiator, maybe that wouldn't have happened. But now you're cool. Yeah, now that I have a TSA redress number. Yeah. Yeah, good times. There's a bad guy out there named Dave Hamilton. A former bad guy. I don't even think he's still a bad guy. I think he's reformed, and yet they still blamed me for him. I don't know. Anyway, now I can get on airplanes. I worked really hard to be able to do that. I went through the whole TSA redress process and all of that stuff. Then I got the letter that's one of my favorite letters I've ever gotten. It had my redress number, which is a number that I now enter when I book flights. The letter said, we have completed our investigation and our results are final. If you have a problem with our results, though, you can appeal them. This is the address to which you would send your appeal. Thank you very much for your time. Sincerely, the US government. There wasn't their conclusion that they screwed up? There was no conclusion listed. They told me that they had finished their investigation and that their results were final. But nowhere in the letter did it ever tell me what the results of the investigation were. So I called them and I said, I don't know if I need to appeal your decision because you've given me these great instructions on how to appeal, but I don't know what your decision is. So it's very difficult for me to decide whether or not I want to go through your appeals process. And they said, yeah, the results of our investigation are confidential. Is it fair enough to say that the result because you got this redress was that you are not, in fact, the same person that they think they were really what I was told was see what happens the next time you try to check in for a flight. That was really like it was like the proofs in the pudding, dude. Like, OK, that's fine. So I went and they didn't say it quite that way. I think I had 90 days to file the appeal. And so the guy said, well, do you have a flight within the next 90 days? I said, as a matter of fact, I do. I've got one in about three weeks. He said, OK, great. When you go to check in, see how that goes. And that might help guide you in your decision as to whether or not you want to file an appeal. Like, OK, thanks, man. Thanks, man. All right. Speaking of thanks, man, let's go to Gary, who is a premium member. And Gary says, I just bought something today using Apple Pay. And I noticed that when I went to do it the first time that it kept saying my address was incorrect. I don't have the problem when I do a physical transaction with my phone or my watch in a physical location that takes Apple Pay. The address issue only comes up when I use it on my Mac or my phone on a website that takes Apple Pay. How do I remove other addresses from my settings? Any help is appreciated? Yeah. So you can tweak those addresses on your phone. And this is, I haven't found a way to do this on the Mac, but there might be one. So if somebody knows of one, please send it in. Feedback at macgeekab.com. That's where you reach us, right? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down, man. What's that? Feedback at macgeekab.com. No, no, no, no, no. It's feedback at macgeekab.com. And you're right. You're right. OK, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So you tweak them on your phone, go to Wallet, the Wallet app, and then you've got them for each credit card. So tap on one of your credit cards, then tap the little I in a circle info button, and scroll down to where it says billing addresses. Tap on that. And there you can choose or edit the address data that's in there. I seem to recall having to set one in there when I first tried Apple Pay online, and then after that sort of everything was good to go. So I felt your pain, Gary. And I think that it's easily solvable for you. So there you go. I don't do Apple Pay online a lot, but when I can, I do. And if you're making a one time donation to Macgeekab Premium, you can do Apple Pay online. Can't do it for a subscription because Apple Pay doesn't support subscriptions, but you can do it for one time. So there you go. Yeah, good, John. Moving on. Yeah, I never... I'm just wondering why that problem would come up to begin with. Maybe if you've put another address in there. I think that's what it was, is, you know, like some credit card companies will, depending on the verification process, will match against either zip code or sometimes even house number and things like that. And so if you don't have the right data associated, they can... It's really, it's not specifically up to the credit card company, but it's the merchant decides what level of verification they are willing to accept is really how that works. Like, to be perfectly honest for our Macgeekab stuff, we have it at like the lowest level. We never had anybody try and... Like, there's no opportunity for fraud. You're literally giving us money, right? I mean, that's, let's be totally clear about how premium works. That's what you're doing, right? So like the idea for fraud just doesn't really enter into that equation. So we have our set really low to keep people from having to like, oh, you know, my address is wrong or the set and the other thing. But you know, for other things where you're buying products or whatever, the opportunity is for fraud or high. And, and there you go. So yeah. Yeah, I was looking here. The iCloud interface only shows the cards. It just let you edit the data as far as I can tell here. Okay. Okay. So I click on my phone and it's like, oh yeah, for Apple Pay. So one, it shows little Apple Pay icon on the device because it can support it. And then it's like, yeah, here's all the cards and it gives less for digits, but it doesn't seem to offer anything to do other than remove all, which I'm not going to do. Yeah, that's a big pain in the neck. Yeah. Pre-registering all your cards. That sucks. And you know, I've got, because I worked for Citibank a hundred years ago, I still have a bunch of accounts with them. And whenever you add a Citibank account to Apple Pay, they mail you a letter saying, your account is good to go on Apple Pay. It's like, yeah, I knew that 14 seconds after I pushed the button, but thanks for the letter three days later. Glad we, glad we went through that process. So all right. I guess we're a little snarky today here, John. That's how that's how it's going to go. Andrew. Well, when, when things don't work as you expect, that there should be some snark. I don't disagree. We're just usually not overly snarky, like not this early in the episode. It's just a salty day with your two favorite geeks. So Andrew writes, he says, I noticed that my 2013 MacBook Air's hard drive running El Capitan seems to have lost its recovery disk. This may have been caused by me doing a restore incorrectly from a clone sometime in the past, but I have tried everything to get the recovery disk back. I've reinstalled Mac OS from an image. And from my clone and from the internet, I have also reformatted the MacBook Air's hard drive so that it would be blank and reinstalled the software using a Mac OS USB install drive. All attempts installed the software correctly onto the MacBook Air, but without installing a recovery disk. I would think a blank hard drive with an external installation from a USB drive would have done the trick, but no, I cannot understand why I am unable to get the recovery disk reinstalled. And yes, there was one there when I first had El Capitan on there. So that's why I say reinstalled. Do I need to try and install High Sierra or will I have the same problem? Do you have any suggestions on how I can get the recovery disk back? So yeah, this doesn't, this isn't a fun process, but there is a Macworld UK article that that will put in the show notes that talks about how to kind of how to go through this process and put everything all back. And I thought I had it, but but no. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's there. I just did PDFs and links sometimes don't work all that well. But but yeah, you can go through. They do recommend though that doing a clean install of Mac OS is the simplest method to get a recovery partition there. But there are other ways and you can do it with the terminal and they will talk through it all. So we will put that on in the show notes. But I think the first thing is to confirm that you truly don't have a recovery partition because if you go looking for it without really looking for it, you won't necessarily see it that it is hidden in it from many things. The best way to test whether you have a recovery partition or not is to boot with command r held down. I think you have to have command. I know it's r. I always do command and r and then that gets me there. But so I got another one for you, my friend. Okay. You go in the terminal. Yeah, disc util space list and it will show all the partitions. You know, recovery. It's going to show that there's one named recovery. Okay. In addition to so I'm looking on this machine right now. So I see recovery, pre boot and Mac mini backup. Oh, because that's my backup disk. But I see the same for the original. So I see on my boot drive, I see Mac mini, one terabyte SSD, pre boot recovery and VM. And the disk that I told you about at first, that's my backup disk. Okay, got it. But show me there too. So in this case, because I use carbon copy cloner, it backs up the recovery partition. Yes. And then we were kind of suggesting is the carbon copy cloner is kind of smart about restoring recovery partitions versus apples stuff. Yeah, it will carbon copy cloner. If you have a backup of your previous recovery partition, carbon copy cloner will put it will restore from that backup, but it won't just create it out of whole cloth. You have to have that backup in order to do that. So there you go. We will put a link to a thing about cloning apples recovery partition that carbon copy cloner has put together as well. Yeah. The only other thing I'll mention is that I found, I don't know what they're doing here, but sometimes the machine gets very persnickety as far as the timing of when you hold down command R. Yeah. And then you got to hold it down, I think. So when you hear the boot chime is when you want to hold it down, you don't want to hold it down after that. If you hold it down after that, I found that it typically does not engage. So I found that. The timing of when you do that is absolutely hold it down while you hear the chime and you should be good. If you don't, it may appear that you do not have recovery when in fact you do. And as Andy, so Warren in the chat room confirms that it is indeed command R. Thank you for the sanity check on that. And then Andy in the chat room says there is no chime on the newer max though, correct? And that is correct. So yeah, just do it before the Apple logo appears is the sort of the general consensus that I think works. And of course our chat room, which is where we livestream the show as well when we record at macigub.com slash stream. That's sad they took the chime away. Well, you know, it's both my machines still chime, but then my my most recent machine is 2014. So I guess they they ax that shortly after 2014. You can mute if you mute your speakers, though, it won't chime, right? When you boot up, I think. So. But yeah, no chime at all on the new stuff. Huh. That's sad. Well, you know, it's just how it goes. Time just added to the charm. Well, also usability is like, you know, you knew when you had to hold down certain keys. So you're talking about the charm of the chime. Is that right, John? The charm of the chime, I think we have our episode name. Perhaps. Well, is it or is it salty day with two favorite geeks? Like, I mean, these things just they're just pouring out here today. So I'm not feeling very salty right now. Well, we're pretty salty before. I don't know. I think we're now we're being salty about whether or not we're salty. So anyway, Mark, we'll we'll round out this first batch of questions. Mark, it actually has two and we'll go through them both. He says the first issue has to do with my new and very cool AirPods. He says I have an iPhone 8 plus running iOS 11.3. The AirPods are nearly magical to talk on and to use, but mine have an unusual feature. Namely, when I take them out of my ears, they will not disengage from my phone. The phone stays connected to the AirPods that's making it impossible for me to hear rings, alerts, anything. Sometimes they even disengage and then reconnect without me without me doing anything. Since I googled this and found many references to AirPods not staying connected, the opposite of my issue, I've tried moving my hand in a variety of ways, faster, slower, a curveball, whatever. When moving from my ears, but this has no real effect. What could be up? All right. So we'll take that one first. I always before I researched for this question for John, for Mark here, John, I always assumed that AirPods had some sort of skin contact sensor like a like, you know, like an electric type sensor that would sense when you were when it was touching skin like a capacitive. That's the word. Thank you. It could have a proximity sensor as well. Right. But they don't. Yeah. There's a page. Well, both apple.com slash AirPods. And then there's a Reddit thread about it indicate that AirPods use optical and motion sensors to know if and when they have been inserted in or removed from your ears. Optical. Optical. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a little camera in there. Well, that's what it may be like a brightness sensor. Right. It doesn't have to be like a super camera. That's right. Yeah. You get a note on your phone like time to clean out your ears, man. So for me with my AirPods, this is worth flawlessly, which is, you know, which is what sort of made me think that there was a, you know, skin slash capacitive sensor. But the good news is that yours should work flawlessly, Mark. And that is always a good thing. So I'm wondering if your optical sensor is somehow blocked or maybe simply malfunctioning. And with that in mind, TMO, we published an article a ways back about factory resetting your AirPods. That's what I would, that's what I would recommend on this is do the factory reset on your AirPods and see if that gets you the solution. Because otherwise, I would go and contact Apple support. And in case you haven't been listening recently, use the Apple support app on your phone or the chat on your Mac to do that. The chat support is fantastic. You know, I spoke in Princeton last week and I wanted to tell people about, because I spoke about running your Mac and iOS devices lean, clean and mean. And one of the things I wanted to show people was the support app. So I never do live demos because live demos are fraught with opportunity for disaster. And well, and at least inconsistency. So I always screen capture, I use screen flow. And, and I, I before I do my presentation, I sit at my desk or whatever. And I, you know, I go and do my things and screen flow capture from the iPhone. So I did a little, you know, and I do just little videos that are me doing the demo, but I know what's going to happen because I've done the video and it's all self-contained, even if I don't have internet access. So I did, I did one of the Apple support app and the video was less than two minutes long. I didn't cut any time out of it. And I had a full chat with someone like start to finish. I went in, tapped that I had a problem with my phone and talked and had a chat. Really, I told them, thanks, you know, I'm here at PMug. And they were like, oh, hey, nice folks at PMug. Great. You know, and we said goodbye. But like they're, I've never had them take more than like two minutes for the initial person to come up. And it it's really stellar. So that's my advice on that. I think we have heard back from Mark, though, and I think that the factory reset solved this issue. So there you go. Any thoughts on that before we move to his, his, his two for his second question? I mean, I want to get some airpods someday. Oh, dude, they're freaking everybody. I love them. Yep. I there is no good reason that I should like these things. And yet I love them. You know, I've said many times, they're the best headset for phone calls that I've ever used in my life. In terms of listening to music, they sound fine. They don't seal. So on an airplane or on like a boat where you're moving and there's wind noise and things like that. Not so good, but a lot of times walking around town or whatever you want to hear ambient noise and they're great for that. So should we move on to Mark's second question? Second deal. Second deal. He says my second issue is with Microsoft Word. I use this for work as I exchange documents with colleagues. I use a 13 inch MacBook Pro running 10.13.2. I'm using MS Word 16 version 15.2. Yep. That's how it works. I have used this particular package for a while, but I've never had this problem until now. The issue is that when I send a document to a colleague and she then sends it back, the permissions have changed. I find this out when I try to save my work and I'm told that I do not have privileges to do this and must save to a different name of the document. As I think of it now, I do not know what kind of system my colleague uses. It is only one person. So I end up with many documents called doc 1, doc 2, doc 3, et cetera. This is not as troubling as the issue above, but the AirPods issue, of course. But it's interesting from a problem solving point of view and thought we could all learn something here. Yeah, this is interesting. It sounds like maybe the other person is using a Mac because they're modifying the permissions of the document and maybe setting extended attributes on it. Well, I'm wondering if they're on the same platform. I'm curious as to the specifics of how the document is being sent. Yeah, good point. I'm going to assume email, but I'm wondering if they're maybe using a file server and the file server is kind of getting in the way. Oh, good point. I'm not sure what versioning they're using. If they're using a Microsoft versioning system or if they're doing an old school, not sneaker net, but emailing it back and forth. But I would imagine if they're emailing it when you receive the document, it should have permissions that are appropriate for the recipient. Right, right. Yeah, Andy in the chat room is saying, are they on the same network? And it's on a share, like you said, because if they're leaving it, oh, if they're leaving the file open, that could also cause this issue if it is tagged as not saved. Oh, good point. There could be a lock on the file. I didn't even think of it at that point. Yeah. I mean, they also have a, don't they, I mean, I haven't done Microsoft Office in ages, but I it depends on how they're collaborating. I believe, you know, if you're using live, whatever their, you know, online deal is, then the collaboration is pretty straightforward. But if you're doing it a different way, again, if you're emailing it or using a file server that's maybe not, you know, Mac friendly, then, or it's open, that's actually a good speculation. Right. Is that they may modify the file, but because, yeah, maybe reporting the wrong error. So if the other person still has it open and hasn't saved and closed out, then a lot of systems don't like two people opening a document at the same time. Yeah. That's a good point. Oh, I like this. I like this. Thanks, Andy. That's a great idea. Yeah. All right. Cool. Yeah. Well, maybe, maybe one of those things we've discussed might help shed some light on this for you, Mark. Yeah. Consider, yeah, this is, I remember back in when I was collaborating with others on documents, we would typically use what we'll call a version control system, where we'd actually check the document in and only one person could have ownership. I mean, a file server, yeah, a file server doesn't really enforce that. Right. Right. Yeah, not, not. Yeah, I'd like to know more about the environment because I think there's, you may be doing what sounds like makes sense, but the system is, is... Yeah. Yeah, not there in the open file thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Hey, John, I want to take a minute here and talk about our three sponsors. Is that, that okay with you? Fantastic. All right. Our first sponsor today is Ring. Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer. And today, over a million people are using the Ring video doorbell to help protect their homes. And guess what? John and I are amongst them. Ring knows that home security begins at your front door, but it doesn't end there. So now they're extending that same level of security to the rest of your house with the Ring floodlight cam. Just like the doorbell, the floodlight cam is motion activated and connects right to your phone with HD video and two-way audio that lets you know the moment someone is there. Setting these things up is super easy. It's like Ring, the whole out-of-box experience was a very Apple-like experience. Everything was in the box that was needed to get this thing up, including when I hung the floodlight, including a little hook to temporarily hang the floodlight while I connected the wires because you don't have a third hand to do that. Then the hook is like no longer necessary. Then you mount the thing and you're good to go. Really, really well done. And it links with your phone, as I said, but it also links with things like Stringify and Ift and all that cool stuff. Very, very cool stuff. And they have a deal. You can save up to $150 off a Ring security kit when you go to ring.com-m-g-g. Again, that's ring.com-m-g-g. Saves $150 off a Ring of Security kit. You got to check it out. Our thanks to Ring for sponsoring this episode. Our second sponsor for today is Code Weavers with Crossover. Crossover allows you to run Windows apps on your Mac without having to run Windows. So this isn't like the virtualization. It's not like what Apple offers. This is very, very unique and very cool because you don't need a Windows license. You don't have to manage a Windows installation. You can just run Windows apps. And many of you, and I'm actually amongst you, many of us have tried Crossover in the past. And to be quite honest, I was non-plussed. Well, as they like to say, as we like to say, if you're holding a grudge, it's time to re-judge. They've done a ton in the current version of Crossover. They released this back in December. Big support now for Quickin 2018, Microsoft Office. Yep, you can run Windows versions of those programs on your Mac without installing a Windows license. So you got to check it out. And here's the deal. If you go to CodeWeavers.com slash MGG, you get a 14-day free trial and then 35% off a one-year subscription with coupon code. You guessed it, MGG. Again, visit CodeWeavers.com slash MGG with coupon code MGG. That'll save you 35% off a one-year subscription. Our thanks to CodeWeavers for sponsoring this episode. Our third sponsor for this episode is BB Edit. And this week, BB Edit celebrated its 25th anniversary. That's right. They created and made the first commercial release of BB Edit back in 1993. Rich Siegel started the company. He's still there. He still works on this to this day. Such a great app. And here's the amazing thing. BB Edit is 25 years old, right? That's nearly twice the age of Mac Geek Gap. In fact, it almost exactly twice the age of Mac Geek Gap. And they still keep this software. It's not only is it relevant, it's like necessary. I can't live without it. It is always running on all of my Macs. Very, very cool stuff. You got to check it out. It's been 25 years. If you haven't checked it out yet, do it now. We got a note from Peter because we talked about searching for carriage returns and line feeds and all that. And Peter said, I use BB Edit all the time. As a school IT director, I do a lot of moving data between various systems. And I find some are quite picky about carriage return line feed and then carriage return slash line feed settings. One thing I love about BB Edit, he says, is the ability to set the option for what type of carriage return or line feed the entire documents using from a menu at the bottom of the screen. This also means that when using find and replace, I can just hit option return. There's your tip in the find field and get whichever version of return that particular file uses. The option key also works to put a tab in the find field if I'm changing from tab separated to comma separated values. 25 years of BB Edit. Congratulations, folks. And thank you so much for sponsoring Mac eCab and in particular, this episode. Visit them at barebones.com. Pretty freaking amazing. 25 years. What do you think about that, John? I like it. I love BB Edit. It's a programmers, not just the programmers, but as a programmer. I've always appreciated the fact that it's smart. It's like, oh, I know what you're doing. I know what language you're using or what language you're speaking or trying to speak. Right, right. It's just amazing doing all that. It's a Swiss army knife of code editors. I like it. All right. Let's move on. Shall we to Charles here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Some cool stuff found. So Charles says, I have been doing home automation for years and I've been burned in two places. First, when I relied on an Insteon hub to communicate to everything. And we've talked about various different types of hubs and we talked about them last week. John has the Wink Hub. I've got a Hugh Hub. There's the SmartThings Hub these days. Insteon. I haven't heard their name for a while. For a while, right? I think they make chips and stuff. Yeah, yeah. And they were one of the first to have a hub to do these things, right? And he says, of course, the problem is if the hub doesn't work, nothing works because the hub is really, it's the gateway between your network and your Internet network and your Internet of Things devices. He says, so I have had several hubs die over the years with no explanation. At that point, my entire automation system is simply down. Secondly, I have an older home which doesn't have a neutral wire. Most switches require a neutral, most smart switches require a neutral wire and therefore I can't use them. So I have started switching my bulbs over to Lifix, L-I-F-X bulbs. And I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that, how Lifix says I should. But he says they are by no means cheap. But they work and are reliable. They are Wi-Fi connected. So there is no hub required and they don't require a neutral wire because they're just bulbs. Additionally, the exterior bulbs have IR in them. So they flood my front yard with IR so my ring doorbell and other night vision cameras can see better. As you know with dimmers, you get on and off in some variation in between. Dimmer switches can't be used with any type of ceiling fan. Of course, with my smart bulbs, he says I also get color. So I can do things like when my first alert CO2 smoke detector goes off, I use home sear, he says. It turns on all of the lights inside and out, then all of the color bulbs flash red and white. So, yeah, Lifix bulbs. I gotta check these out. This is the next thing on my list here, John, because this is like, I like the idea of a hubless system and bulbs or even switches. Like I have a TP-Link smart outlet and it, I mean, it's just a thing. It plugs into the outlet and then you plug into it, but it is Wi-Fi. So there is no hub required as long as it's within range of your Wi-Fi signal, you are good to go. And it's brilliant. It works great. So, pretty cool. I remember the last time I was at the, I think it was Home Depot or whatever home product store, but I'm sure, I think they also have some that do Bluetooth. So they're also hubless. So this is, as was mentioned, the Wi-Fi version, but I've also seen Bluetooth-based ones that again are hubless. And I guess they use your iDevice, the hub to control them. Your device becomes the hub, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And they're not using one of these Z standards. So, Not, right, right. Yeah. Well, for some people, you know, it makes sense maybe not to have it all centralized, right? Well, you know, it's- Single point of failure, right? It's a single point of failure. It's not that it's centralized. In fact, that's the problem is it's, you know, hanging off of this, like you said, the weak link in the, or any link in the chain. Yeah, there you go. Very interesting. All right, cool. Thank you for that, Charles. Food for thought. So this is good. We'll dig into that. Leon brings us to another cool stuff found to replace a favorite in the cool stuff found list. We'll find it here. Leon says, our dear friend RC default apps appears to be broken as of macOS 10.12. Fortunately, he says there is a free replacement written in Swift. So RC default apps, or RC default app, lets you change and manipulate the essentially the system database that decides what app launches when a certain document or certain URL helper is called upon. And RC default app, I guess, in some way seems to be broken since 10.12. And so someone created a new one. Now, it's called Swift default apps for lack of a better name. And it's hosted at GitHub. So I will tell you something about this. When you visit the page at GitHub, or visit any GitHub page, what you normally see is the sort of all of the file list of all of the files that are in the project. And you could download the project from that page and compile it in Xcode and run it if you want. But if you don't want, go to the releases tab. And if the developer has built things for you to do this, which thankfully Lord Kamina has who built Swift default apps, you can go to the releases page and see a release that as of this moment in time that we're recording this was released 29 days ago, and you just download the zip file and run it. Now, that being said, these apps are not signed by an official Apple certificate. So when you go to launch this the first time, it'll say it can't run because it's not signed by an official Apple certificate. So you have to right click on it. And a lot of apps are like this. I think Onyx is like this too, John, right? You right click on it and choose open. And then you'll get a similar dialogue that says I can't run this. But now the dialogue, when you right click and do open, the dialogue has a bypass or an open button that lets you bypass that. And then after that, it'll just run. So there you go. For free, Swift default apps. Pretty good stuff, right, John? It's odd, though, because I'm still running RC default app on my MacBook Pro, and it seems to work just fine. So I don't know if it actually, it's not on my mini. I should try to install it. Maybe there's something with the installer now where it just doesn't work. Yeah, it's definitely it's absolutely running. And like you said, it's a great tool to see what's happening underneath the covers as to how how the OS decides what app to do what, I think, is basically what it shows you. Yeah, let's you change. And sometimes things get confused. It's like, Well, no, I don't want to open a picture with that. I don't want to with that. It's like, Yeah, you can do it through the finder a lot of times. But in this, but sometimes you have to get your hands dirty. So I'm on I'm on Sierra up here in the studio, John. And I just installed I didn't I did the one thing that we should never do while we're podcasting installing a live machine. I installed it. Yeah, preff pain that manipulates the system in an unsupported way. I installed that just now while we were talking and RC default app installed just fine on Sierra. So I don't know about high Sierra. It's possible that maybe not so much there. But but anyway, just figured it out. Yeah, I think a more modern option with maybe more options than Darcy default app. Sure. Yeah, that's possible. So check it out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me see. Can you can you install both simultaneously? I think you can whenever. Oh, you know, let's not let's not do that. Oh, hey, guess what? I tested it. It works. Oh, this is reading from P list files pretty much. No, this is interesting though, John. At least, huh, I can't see RC default app in my preff pain. Oh, interesting. They're like assassinated or what? Yeah, I'm doing bad things here, man. No, it does not appear. Oh, no, there it is. It's called default apps. Yeah, you know, they're both they both run side by side. It's totally fine. It's totally fine. But when these launch, I mean, RC default apps the same way I have to right click and choose open to get it to allow me to do it. And then these are both preff pain. So it's a little weird if you've never installed a preff pain before what happens is system preferences opens up and says you're trying to install a new preference pane. And then it will ask you if you're an administrator, which if you haven't changed the defaults you are, it will ask you do you want to install it just for this user? Or do you want to install it system wide for all users? My sort of default choice in that scenario, unless I have a very good reason to want it to be installed system wide, I install it only for that one user account. Because that way if it causes a problem, I'm not dealt or left dealing with a system wide problem. I can I can target my troubleshooting to just my user account, if that makes sense. Good. Yeah. And well, the thing is either of you's utilities, Dave. So I'm with you on that to restrict the usage. Yeah, I just mean in general, these things are pretty innocuous. But yeah, just in general. Well, no, the thing is is that if you don't know what you're doing, you can make matters much worse. Right. Right. Especially if you start changing things. So it may be best to restrict it to the administrator who let's assume they know what they're doing. Right. Right. That's true. Yes. Good point. Good point. Well, I was thinking of it, even as a single user machine, if I'm the only one using machine, I still limit it just to the user account. And there's a couple reasons. Number one, when I migration assistant over to another machine, it brings it with me. I don't know that it brings the system wide prep pains, it might, but at least this way, it's all self contained in my user account. But the main reason is troubleshooting because I always and here's your bonus tip of the episode before disaster strikes. So do this now. Go create a test user account on your Mac. Make it an administrator. Do not forget the password and leave it alone. Right. Do nothing with it. Don't install any apps into it. Don't make any settings changes. Nothing. Just leave it alone. And then that way, when the day comes that you've totally foo barred your user account by installing all these things that John and I tell you to install, you can go and log in to your test user account and see are things okay over there. And if they are, then you know, your problems are limited to just your user account. And maybe you can do some additional diagnosis from the test user account, or maybe that's just the information you need. But I have been in scenarios where not having another account to log into has been a real problem when, for whatever reason, I can't log into my main account. It hasn't happened in a while, but that's because I create a test user account. You know, Murphy is on my speed dial, right? So if I don't prepare myself for disaster, then Murphy likes to show up and say, Hey, guess what? I'll show you. So there you go. That's my tip for you all. Do you do that, John? No. Okay. Do you understand the value in it? No. Okay, good. Perfect. Yeah. No, you explained it fine. You throw caution to the wind. Rarely have I had a problem where creating, having another account did anything for me. Sure. But for a lot of people, it can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it hasn't happened yet. You know what? It's going to happen probably today. I know. Something's going to fail miserably. You could literally do it while you're listening to the show because you don't need to, or while you're even participating, right? You just go to system preferences, users and groups and unlock there and then hit plus and add the account. And then just leave it alone. You don't even have to log in. So there you go. How about the guest account? I'll just turn it on. No, no, no, no, no, no. You will not use the guest account. Please don't use the guest account. Wait, aren't you supposed to turn that on to enable? Yeah, this is from the mists of time, but I thought you had to enable that in order to enable a certain functionality, at least on the Mac. That'll come back to me. Oh, well, yeah. My guest account on this computer is on. I'm turning it off. On both of mine, it's, let's see, I believe on mine, it's off. So I think it's a account created by default. On one machine, it's set to sharing only. Okay, isn't that weird? Okay. Oh, interesting. We're going down a rabbit hole here. No, this is interesting. Yeah, yeah, because you can. You can check the box that says allow guest users to connect to shared folders. So that means they can't log in locally, but guests can get at shared folders on your machine. I think, I think turn off the guest account, but, but John in the chat room says that anonymous FTP might require the guest account to be active. So, and I thought the find my Mac at some point required the guest to be turned on. Well, I think what would happen is that if you had the guest account turned on and somebody swiped your machine and then they logged in, if they logged in as a guest, it would then phone home and say, oh yeah, here's the approximate location. I see what you're saying. I think that was a justification at one point. Okay. Okay. Fascinating. Yeah, this is crazy. Great. So now I can't turn any of this off, by the way, my guest account. No, like I unchecked the box and then I come back and it's checked again. So something's messed up with my computer. Maybe now it's not the right time for me to troubleshoot this. I want to tell you about an app that has been part of cool stuff found. And I was just in Princeton this past week speaking to their wonderful group there. And like I said, talking about running your McLean Clean Amine. And this one came up and I saw a lot of eyes in the room sort of latch on. So I wanted to say it again here on the show. It's an app called AppTamer. And it's built by, man, I always get, it's St. Clair software, right? The default folder folks, John Gotal, I think. And AppTamer default folder is yet another piece of software that you should like definitely have. Indispensable. Indispensable, right. But what AppTamer does is it monitors the processes that are running on your system and allows you to suppress them either entirely or beyond a certain point. So for example, you can say, okay, when the spotlight indexer starts using more than 20% of the CPU, throttle it so that it doesn't just completely take over my system. And you can with apps that can be like spotlight indexers always in the background. But for an app, say like Mail, oh, maybe I should do this on this computer. Anyway, for an app like Mail, you can tell it, you know, when it's in the foreground, let it do whatever. When it's in the background, if it starts using more than 20% of the CPU, you know, keep it there. Don't don't let it go above 20%. And I'll tell you on a machine, especially dual core machines, and there are tons of us out here that still in some way shape or form are using, you know, five, six, seven, eight, nine, even 10 year old Macs. This app adds a ton of life and responsiveness to those types of machines. So definitely worth checking out. I think it's, I mean, it's a for pay app as it should be. But I'm sure it's you get a 15 day free trial and then it's okay. Then it's 1495 us. So there you go. Highly recommended. So there you go. That's my are, are they just being nice? Is that what they're really doing? You know what I'm talking about? Yes, I know what you're talking about. There's a Unix facility called nice that facilities the wrong term. But anyway, a Unix feature called nice that allows you to set what processes have greater priority than others really, which one should be nicer, which one should be less nice. No, I don't think that's just what's happening here. I think he's doing more than that. It really does throttle them like it, like if a process is nice, it'll, it'll still use 100% of your CPU, right? Whereas I don't think that's what's happening here. So yeah, it's pretty interesting. I don't know what he's doing. It's pretty cool to be worth asking. Maybe, yeah. Maybe he'll tell us. Yeah, yeah, he might. At some point in the past, there was something called re-nicer. And I think it does still work. Yep, yep. But it got, it got down into the lower levels of the OS and that it would show you. It's like, okay, well, here's the nice level for all the things you're running. You want to change any of them? And it's like, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was kind of primitive and that you had to do it on a process by process basis. And I think re-nicer coalesced it and showed, so you showed you everything in one screen. Yep. Good. Yeah, does re-nicer even exist? I'll put a link in the show notes if it does, just so we can, we can talk about it. I see some references from third-party sites, but it looks like it may not be current. It doesn't exist anymore. Oh well. Yeah. I don't think it supported Tamer. So one feature that AppTamer has is a feature that I use on all my machines, even the ones that I don't use AppTamer on. And it allows you to quit an app when that particular app has been idle for more than x number of minutes and you get to set x. And where this is really handy is, you know, we wind up opening apps on our Mac all day long and then we don't need them. We don't use them and we can free up RAM and resources by quitting them. But you don't want to have to think about going back and quitting them. So AppTamer will, will let you set this on an app by app basis. If you don't want to use AppTamer, if that, if you don't have a reason to, Marco Arment has released an app called Quitter that does exactly this. It is free and this is all it does, though. It doesn't do any of the other throttling or anything that AppTamer does. But it will let you set when to quit apps. Again, based on the apps idle time. So you could be using your Mac. And if you don't use, let's say, QuickTime Player for more than, you know, if you set it to 30 minutes, you could be doing things in mail and Safari and whatever. And if QuickTime Player has been sitting there for 30 minutes and you haven't touched it, boom, off it goes. That's it. So it's a pretty cool, a pretty cool little thing to be able to to do, whichever app you use to do it. I, I use it for a lot of things, but one of the main ones is Safari. I set Safari to two hours. And the reason I do that is because it's rare that I'm at my Mac for two hours. And rare that I'm at my Mac and I don't use Safari at least once every two hours. But overnight, this forces Safari to quit, which makes my Mac much happier the next morning rather than having Safari run for days and days on end. So, so there you go. Anyway, that's. Yeah, I thought you always supposed to take care of all that. It does not. But it absolutely. Shouldn't, shouldn't it though? Um, sure. But you could just use these apps to take care of that for you and actually get it done. You know, yeah. Yeah. All right. Man, I hate it when it does this. Oh, yeah. So listener Scott mentioned, and then I asked him about it. He does a lot of cycling and said that he listens to Mac Keekab while he's cycling. And I thought, yeah, I like that idea. I mean, it's great. But I'm always nervous on the bike with headphones. So I asked him what headphones he uses on the bike. And we might hear from Andy in the chat room on this too. But he says, the earbuds that I use for cycling are the Phaser PHAISER BH 750s, which sell for about 35 bucks. And we've got a link for it in the show notes. He says, I love my AirPods, but they are not practical for cycling. I need a physical button to do things because you can't depend on Siri to raise or lower volume or skip a song while you're rolling along. He says, I also have and the phaser ones are Bluetooth and are have a kind of a band that goes from ear to ear. But but that's it. It just sort of lays on your neck. But there's no cord going to your phone or anything. It says, I also have wired Bose Sport earbuds that I do use occasionally in other Bluetooth headsets. He says, but the phasers are really good. That definitely not great sound. But he says they're really durable and have a very stable Bluetooth connection. He says, I've had them connect to my phone from their spot hanging in the garage when I'm on the second floor of my house. So he says, they're sufficient for podcasts. He says, I wouldn't use them for like sitting and enjoying an album or anything, but perfect for on the bike. So there you go. So thank you for that cool stuff found Scott. Good stuff. I have a small concern, Dave. I'm uncomfortable seeing people operating either a two or four wheeled vehicle wearing earphones. Well, that's why I asked him about this because like, for example, you're less aware of what's happening around you. Like say, there's an emergency vehicle coming now. Their sirens are loud enough where you should be able to either see it or hear it. But it just makes me uncomfortable while operating any sort of vehicle that you're listening to something that's not the world around you. So let me let me for safety sake, let me see if I can encapsulate this. And then and then because I think there's a conversation to have here. So you don't like the idea of there being a speaker in between the outside world and your ears when operating either a motorized or or self-propelled vehicle. Is that right? Correct. Now I understand there's of course a stereo in a car. But that's exactly the same thing, right? A stereo in a car. Really? Because it's not in your ear is that you can hear your radio in the car, but you can also hear other things happening around you. I would. Okay. So I believe your ability to hear things outside of the music when you have earbuds is less. Well, that so believing something because in your heart of hearts you like to believe it is great, but there's no difference between. We're talking about a speaker between your ear and the outside world that's playing sound that's other that's different from what's in the outside world, which is why I ask Scott about this. Because again, using something like AirPods where you're letting ambient noise in makes a huge difference, right? Okay, so it's not a sealed connection. Okay, I get it. Yeah. And that's why some of these sport earbuds are pretty cool because they, I mean, one thing that a seal does of course is blocks out external sound. Another thing that a seal does is it locks the earbud into your ear, right? And that's why people especially, you know, initially are really nervous about AirPods falling out because they have no seal so they could just come out. A lot of these sport earbuds and these phasers look like they have it too. Have like a it's almost a spring, but but not in the sense of a spring that you're looking at where it sets inside the your outer ear but doesn't seal in like your ear canal. So it locks into your outer ear and then positions the speaker right where it's supposed to be, which is kind of a cool thing. So so anyway, it's, you know, yeah, I just see things. The other thing I saw the other day was a kid riding his bike and it was texting on his phone. Now that I think seems like a bad idea. Probably not a great idea. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like a bad idea. I mean, I was watching and I was expecting something terrible to happen because he was clearly not paying attention to what was happening around him. Sure. Yeah. To a greater extent than if you're, okay. So, so yeah, if they're not sealed, then yeah, I think the, yeah. And Scott, Scott does say. Sounds of your environment could get through. I mean, and there's different levels of seal, right? So, you know, again, you've got to find what you're comfortable with. But Scott says when he's in high traffic scenarios, he will take one out so that he can, you know, so that he can hear around him. Yeah, well, that's smart. And that's what's really nice about this sort of idea of this sport thing where it hangs around your neck because you can leave one in one ear and you're not worrying about what's happening to the other ear. But it's just, it's, you know, dangling there for, for lack of, for lack of, I don't know, the better, better option. There's the ones I've used that are very similar to these are the Plantronics Backbeat Fit that do a very similar thing. And they kind of hang on you. These go sort of over the ear and hang, not over the ear, around the ear, kind of like an in ear monitor would, but same kind of thing where they Oh, nice. They sort of lock into your interior and we'll put, I'll put those in the show notes too. Oh, sweet. Yeah. Plantronics is quality stuff. I got a Plantronics analog headset and it's really nice. Yeah, they, yeah, I mean, yeah, I agree. They make quality stuff for sure. Let's see, Plantronics Backbeat Fit. Where are we here? Wait, wait, wait. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Fit. Great. So I'll put that in the show notes too. I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium subscribers. I know we mentioned it earlier, the concept in the program earlier in the episode. It is a program where those of you that can and would like to support us directly are able to do that. We have various levels of support and you can check it all out at macgeekab.com slash premium. And you know, one of the main things you get is that premium at macgeekab.com email address which we prioritize and really you just get our thanks and that warm fuzzy feeling that comes along with supporting your two favorite geeks. So we really appreciate it and I like to shout out, we like to shout out everyone that contributes each week. So this week on the biannual $25 contribution schedule, we had Scott G, Brian W, Brian M, no relation, Daniel W, Jim W. I don't think any of these people are related and Daniel W is on the six month plan but on the $50 every six month plan because you can set your own amount. Dennis M, Art K, Michael S and Daniel M. So thanks to all of you on the monthly $10 plan we have Scott F, John G, Frank A, James C, Barry F, Joe S, Paul M, Ari L, Michael P, and Bob L, all of their contributions came in this week. And then a one time $50 contribution from Tim M. Thank you so much to everybody, all of you that of course that came in this week, but really everybody who's a premium subscriber. Thank you so much for that. And again, macgeekab.com is where you can learn about that if you like. All right, where are we here? Yeah, let's keep moving here. We've got a question from John. I think let's see where we go with this and see what happens. And why is Evernote not being happy with me? There it is. Okay. Let's just have an update. Yeah, I don't think I did the update. Maybe I did. So listener John says I'm helping a friend who just switched to a cable modem. He bought a surfboard 6580 which was on the approved list of his cable company and had someone else do the cabling inside his house at the time of setup. The cabling guy said it was working and he was getting good download speeds. When my friend later connected his iMac via Wi-Fi, he found that his webpage inquiries would show the blue bar progressing until a quarter of the way and then stall. And of course his email wasn't coming through at all. That's when he called me. I confirmed what he was seeing and he did the following further testing. His iMac is getting a reasonable IP from DHCP. It's talking to the router. He says I tried my laptop, same stall. I tried my laptop as a wired connection. Same problem. So it's not a Wi-Fi issue. I tried my iMac on my iPhones. I tried his iMac rather on my iPhone's personal hot spot which works fine. So it's not a problem on the Mac. I tried to alternate DNS servers both on the Mac and in the router. Same behavior. So it's not a DNS issue. He says and I called Comcast to confirm that the modem was properly provisioned. It was and that they were seeing it as quote unquote working and it was. But since it's not their modem slash router, he bought it directly. They're only willing to confirm things, not troubleshoot. And he says in the modem's web interface which he can get to which is interesting. So he can get there. Says I'm seeing bonded channels and frequencies, power measurements and all that look reasonable. So and he asked, you know, is there is there anything we can do? What's next? So I share this not because we have the answer but because he went through some fantastic troubleshooting steps to really narrow down that this is not an issue with any of the specific computers. It's not a Wi-Fi issue. It's definitely and he's able to talk to the cable modem via its IP address. So it really is just getting data in and out of the network as a whole. I would, you know, do in the when you're talking about a cable modem, which is what this is. It's it's many things, right? But it is also the cable modem doing a factory reset on the cable modem can often help. Even if you own your cable modem, it downloads its software from your provider. So if it got the wrong software or somehow got provisioned, maybe it's locked in and thinking it's provisioned one way and needs to be provisioned another, doing a factory reset on that will force it to just, you know, sort of say hello again the first time. And and maybe pull down the right the right software. There's not a whole lot you can do in terms of changing settings on a cable modem. And it seems like that's where the issue might be. So any thoughts on that, John? If you have a switch, it could be confused seeing all this new stuff happening. Yeah, for sure. I've had resetting a switch and I'm not sure if there's a switch. Right, right. That's part of this. Another thing you can try. So it sounds like it's mostly a Wi-Fi issue. No, no, because he that was one of the things he tested. He said, okay, I saw it earlier. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I know that's why I liked about this is he, you know, he he like did all the right steps to really start to narrow things down. And yeah, it's good. Okay, because there is so one tool just to mention to people here. So if you go to your airport menu, and you think you're having an internet problem or Wi-Fi problem, if you go to your airport menu, you hold down option, you will see open wireless diagnostics can't hurt. No, no, it basically runs through various things and it'll say, yeah, I think your internet connections broken or it tries to isolate the problem. So I'll just say that it's another tool to put in your toolbox. Doesn't always get it right. But it can't hurt because sometimes it does identify the problem. It's like your network's down. That's what I got to offer. Cool. Good stuff. All right, let's let's so I know we don't have an answer for this. Obviously, if anybody does, feel free to, you know, contact us and send it in. But but hopefully, hopefully you've sorted it out, Bill. Sorry, John. And I have, I said Bill because jumping to Bill, you want to take us there, John? I'm going to take us to Bill. Bill has a good one. So we're going to get into some terminology clarification here. So the title of the email is Sending Encrypted Documents Cross Platform. Okay. And that's a noble goal. Sure. And he wrote, Dave and John, I was recently asked to send a sensitive document via email. I asked the person if he had an iPhone. He did. So I could send the document via messages instead, since messages has end to an encryption. My question is, what if he had said no, what would be the best and easiest way to send an encrypted document to an Android or other platform user? Preferences would go to a method that would not involve having to tell someone to install an app or certificate on their end. It's a good, it's a good question. This is a big question, Dave. Yeah. So I, like, go ahead. Yeah, I got it. All right. So iMessage is, if you both have it, then that's a perfectly acceptable solution. And I'm not going to get in the sausage part of this, where I made some of... Well, no, let's talk about what iMessage does, because he mentioned something in his email, which is end to end encryption, right? So there are many places in the chain that things can be encrypted. But, for example, if he were to email this document, more than likely, it would be the transmission of the document would be encrypted, in that his email client would connect securely to his email server, and anybody sniffing that connection wouldn't see the contents of that. They would just see encrypted blobs. But anybody that could intercept that email, say at the server end or anywhere else in between, would get the document, right? No question, because the document itself is not encrypted through the transmission process, right? So when it's stored on an email server or stored somewhere else, it's just stored in plain, you know, in its raw default format. And to me it was important to distinguish between sending an encrypted document and sending something over an encrypted channel. Right. But the difference with... And you can do one or the other, or you can do both, and actually the more the better, in my opinion. Right. So what iMessage does is not only does it have that part, which email does generally, where the transmission itself is encrypted, iMessage also encrypts the contents, local end to end, meaning if iMessaging John, I type something on my computer or I put an attachment in, it doesn't matter either way. And then my computer encrypts it locally on the computer before it sends it off. And yes, it goes through Apple servers, and who knows, it might go through other servers too. Anybody that looks at it, all they see is an encrypted blob. And the only people that have the password to decrypt it are me and John. Apple cannot see that message going through, which is very different from what happens with email and its default state. And yeah, there's some very cool things about how Apple achieves this, where you have local passwords on each of your devices, local encryption keys really is a better way to say it, on each of your devices that you don't even have to worry about, and it's just magic. But suffice to say that it works, and it's encrypted end to end, and it's super easy, which is great. But not so great if you have to send to somebody on non-Apple platform. So there you go. Now in that case, one of my suggestions to do that sort of thing, Dave, is most cloud services, be it iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, and I verified this with Dropbox and OneDrive, at least for me, it still works, is that if you have a document in your cloud, you can send someone a link that they load in their browser, and then they can access the document. But it's not encrypted. Like Dropbox could see the contents of that document, Apple could see the contents of that document. And you brought up the distinction, and that is... I want to make the distinction, so you have a secure channel because it's HTTPS typically, these links. So the link is secure. Right. And the document's encrypted on their server, but once you access it, it then decrypts. Yeah, they have the keys in that case because any web-based service generally, in order to do that, the service provider needs to hold the keys. And that's where potentially it falls down. You need to decide. Like in this case, Bill was saying, I definitely want it end-to-end encrypted. Okay, and there are apps, right? I think... Is it HIDER from MacPaw, right? I want to say... Well, I was going to bring those up, but actually I can bring those up now. Yeah, go ahead. Well, the HIDER isn't quite it, so there's another one from them, Dave. Okay. So if we want to bring up... If you want to add extra security and you encrypt the document with your own key or password, which is typically the same thing, that's a more secure solution rather than sending a document over a secure connection. Am I making sense? Sure, yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there are a few programs that can do this. So a couple that I found, Dave. So one, and I think this is... HIDER isn't quite it, in crypto. In crypto, that's it. So there's something called in crypto from MacPaw, and they have it for the Mac, and they have it for Windows. So if you're talking between Mac and Windows, what it basically does is it uses AES-256. You know, it's single key encryption or private key encryption, and you've got to share the password, which is the encryption key, with the other person, and then they can open it up. Right, right. Another solution, Dave, actually, which is kind of cross-platform here is... I don't know if you know this, but you know ZIP? Yeah, but ZIP doesn't encrypt it. It has a password protection. I believe it... It has a switch called encrypt, and I believe the current versions use the same AES-256 encryption. Check it out. Okay. All right. Now, if you look, if you do a man page on ZIP, and I think ZIP is pretty consistent, it'll say, oh, well, if you do dash E, that encrypts it. And you basically come up with... So ZIP is available on Mac and on Windows and then Unix and everything, and as long as it's up to a certain version, based on what I could find, I did some quick research. It actually is using AES-256. Okay. I'll buy that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So using either one of these to encrypt the document before you put it over an encrypted channel, I think would be a more secure solution. The thing is you have to find a way to communicate that password, which is part of the key to the other person. That's the problem. And you probably want to use a different channel. Right. You might have to call them on the phone and read them the password or something like that. Yeah, you don't want to send the password in the email because then everybody will get the email. It doesn't matter. It's encrypted, right? But... Can I shake my fist when I get emails from businesses and they're like, oh yeah, here's some... Yeah, here's your updated password. And it's like, dude, you just sent this an email that's not secure. It's like, why are you doing this? Why are you doing this? Yeah. So, but really, we could keep coming back or I keep coming back to the elegance of iMessage here, right? Because it does all this end-to-end encryption without... Like, I'm sure there are many, many people listening to this show right now saying, I had no idea that iMessage was end-to-end encrypted. That's pretty cool. But it is and it always has been. If only there was something that were cross-platform that did end-to-end encryption. And here's the deal. There is. And it's called WhatsApp. And WhatsApp says, end-to-end encryption is always activated. There's no way to turn off end-to-end encryption. So, yeah, WhatsApp is a... It's very much like iMessage, except that it's available for every platform and works very, very well and is available for free. And we can put a link in the show notes to it, of course, because that's what we do. But yeah, it will do exactly the same thing that... I believe exactly the same thing that iMessage is doing. So, there you go. So, that might be... Honestly, that might be the simplest way to do it, is to just use WhatsApp. And then you don't have to think about, how am I going to communicate the password? How am I going to encrypt this? How am I going to send the password to this person? Essentially, what will happen is, when you launch... When you create your WhatsApp account, each of your devices... And this is what happens with iMessage too, by the way. When you create your account, when you log your device into your account, it creates a key pair. And one of the keys can be used to encrypt data, but not decrypt it. And the other can be used to decrypt, but not encrypt. So, you can share the public key that can encrypt data with anyone, because that's all they can do with it is encrypt it, and then you have to use your special private key to decrypt it. And it shares that key around automatically on WhatsApp servers. So, when somebody goes to send you something, it's like, hey, does John have a private key or a public key? Yes, great. Give it to me. I'll encrypt it locally here, and then I'll send it across the network, and everything's good to go. So, there you go. Another option is... And actually, they've changed. So, I don't... Back when I was doing the corporate thing, an IT would yell at us for sending huge files over email, and they said, that's not what we e-mails for. And it's like, well, yeah, but it works. And they're like, well, no, because, you know, we've got to buy more disks, because you guys are using this for the wrong reason. There was a service which has since changed its name, but remember, yousendit.com? Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, they're still out there, but now they're called something different. So, they are also, I would say, in essence, an end-to-end encryption solution. And they use an encrypted channel for you to send your document to them, and then they store it, and then the recipient gets an email, and it's basically using secure web connections to then download the document. They're now at a different place. If you go to yousendit, it redirects you to something called hightail.com. Right, that's the replacement for it, yeah. And they have various services. The point I want to make is that there are a lot of things that... So, the requirement here was, I don't want certificates, I don't want to do any additional work here, and a browser-based solution can do what you need versus something that's semi-proprietary, like iMessage, because I don't think they have iMessage for Windows, right? Or do they? I don't think so. No, no, they don't. No, that's the problem. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Or the cloud services. Again, a lot of them offer a way to share documents with people. I was surprised. I thought that Dropbox was not allowing public sharing anymore, but it still works for me. Oh yeah, no, no, no. They allow public sharing. What they stopped was the ability to host an image, right? So, people were post-putting a lot of web forums and stuff. If you want to publish an image in your forum post, the forum doesn't want to host that. So, you have to host it somewhere and just provide a link to the image. And for a long time, you could do that and just point to an image on Dropbox and it would load. Now, that link would allow you to download the image, but it doesn't allow you to just host it. So, that's what they changed, is that? Yeah, so. Okay, because people were sucking major bandwidth. Correct, people were abusing the service. It's exactly right. Yeah. Well, I think they sent you a nasty gram if it got out of control. Right. But we're going to deactivate your account. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, you know, we have... So, I'm going to put regarding WhatsApp. You know, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, right? So, there's some questions about how secure is WhatsApp. And The Guardian did a great piece that has now since been peer reviewed and modified significantly about WhatsApp and the way they manage this end-to-end encryption and who actually has the keys and where the keys are generated and all that stuff. It seems like it's pretty darn secure, but it's worth reading this piece. So, there you go. But, you know, and this could evolve, right? There's nothing that says that even if today it's fine, like there was that whole thing that the WhatsApp founders left because they didn't like the plans that Facebook had for decrypting all this stuff. So, you know, maybe be aware of eyes wide open on all this stuff. So, somebody else will come in with something, I hope, that does end-to-end cross-platform because that's what we really need. Opportunity knocks. And if you know about something, let us know. I mean, it's kind of happening because there's been this HTTPS everywhere initiative. Yeah, but again, that doesn't... Like, if you send us something... Well, it provides a level of security. Yeah, it does. Yeah, for sure. Transport security, if you will. Yeah, not data security, but transport security. That's right. You know, I saw that the other day. I went to a website, I think, on my iPhone and it actually put up the message. It was like in red in the address bar saying, dude, this site is not secure. So, that's actually a great tip. That's a new thing in Safari. Hang on. Let me tell you what version. Safari 11.1, right? Where if you go to a website that is not HTTPS, so it's not transport secure, and that website has a username and password field on it, Safari will put in the bar either on your Mac or on your iOS devices, you said, John. It'll say, hey, yo, this website's not... Like your connection to this website is going over the unclear text. It's not encrypted. So, whatever password you send, if somebody's sniffing your Wi-Fi packets, they could see this password. So, that's what that whole thing is about. Nothing has changed other than Apple is now sort of beating you over the head with the concept of... Oh, yeah. Well, it's eye-catching. I mean, it has the, you know, exclamation mark in a circle, and it's all in red. Right. You can't miss it really, and that's good. Yeah, Ari in the chat room is saying that Signal might do end-to-end encryption. And I think you might be right, Ari. So, we will put a link to that too, but does Signal do end-to-end encryption? We'll see. So, thank you. He may be crazy, too. Well, what's that? Ari may not only be right, but he may be crazy. Okay. Sorry. Just to lead in. You don't recognize the lyrics? Come on, man. Well, I mean, Billy Joel's song, but I don't know why Ari is there. Like, I'm not relating Ari to Billy Joel, but I did get the lyric reference, so. Got it. Yeah. Sorry, Ari. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah. It looks like Signal does do end-to-end encryption, so we'll put that in the notes, and maybe we should all get Signal so that we're not using WhatsApp as life moves forward. So, there you go. Thanks, Ari. All right. I think it's time, John. I think we have to go and find the band, because, you know, here it is. Yeah. Well, that's how it goes. You know, there we are. Well, you've got places to go and things to do. We all do, but, you know, we're hitting our time limit here. We actually have been very efficient today with the show, so we've got lots of stuff to talk about. Well, I knew that you had something to do. So, we've already told you the email. What else can we tell people? What do you think, Dave? I think we should tell them about the phone number, John, because you can call us and leave us a voicemail, and we love voicemail. In fact, we have quite a few voicemails that we're probably going to play in the next episode, because it's a great way for you folks to send questions when you're driving. So, 224-888-Geek, which is, John? As always, four, three, three, five. I also want to tell everybody about our Mac Geek Gab iOS app. So, you can, in the app, it's free, right? So, just go to the App Store, download it. In the app, you can obviously listen to the show. You can save bookmarks about different chapters that you liked in the show or different segments. When you send us a question from the app, which you can do, either voice or text, it will tag what episode and what chapter you were on when you sent that question or reply so that we know what exactly was going on. We try to make life really easy for you. And you'll get push notifications about the live stream. And you can listen to the live stream and even participate in chat right there in the iOS app. It's pretty freaking cool if you ask me, so. And I think you did ask me, or at least you chose to listen to us when you press play. So, thank you for that, too. Thanks for everything, everybody. You guys rock. Thanks to CashFly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to all of our sponsors, right, John? Because without them, you know, that's part of the... It's frankly part of the financial picture of what makes the show work. And we have all of you as premium members and all of our sponsors, and it really all just kind of pulls it all together. So, as we get down to it, Dave, you just got to follow the money. Well, I mean, that's what it takes to make the world go round. It really is, you know, and we like to be able to spend the time to do this. So, we're very, very thankful that we are people. But does it have to? I mean, can't we get to Star Trek with, you know, just getting on a starship and there's no... I mean, there's no money. You ever seen money in a Star Trek? Yeah, but there's still power struggles. I mean, it's money is just a manifestation of a symbol of power, right? And so, it's really the same problems. I don't know that it's any... And I actually just got through watching... Some of it got weird towards the end, but I just got through watching DS9. And of course, if you watch DS9, you know that a certain character really likes Gold Press Latin. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, crazy at the end, man. I had never watched it till the end. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I heard they're gonna bring it out in HD now. Now that I've finished binging on it, they're gonna bring it out in HD. I didn't think that was possible for that particular series, but anyway, that's good. There was rumors that it wasn't financially effective for them to do that, even though they have the content in HD. Oh, they do. Okay. No, I mean, film is super high DPI. I mean, they could easily take from the rich... Sure. ...from the film and make. I mean, they did it for the original series. They know HD versions. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, good point. Yeah, good point. Cool. Well, they got to do it while all of us Trekkie geeks are still like, you know, here and kicking along. So, yep. All right. I'm still not happy about Discovery and that I don't want to lay down extra cash to watch. Yeah, I still pay my $6.95 a month or whatever to pay to watch Discovery because it's pretty good. So there you go. Really? Yeah. I'm gonna make consider it, of course. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the CBS app, I think, is how we do that and then watch it through Apple TV. Well, CBS All Access. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, folks. Have a stellar week and we can't wait to see you again next week, but we will have to wait at least a little bit and then we will see you. So, there you go. Thanks to our sponsors again, ringring.com slash mgg, codeweavers.com slash mgg, barebones.com. What else we got? Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast otherworldcomputing at maxsales.com. Have a... I got some advice for you, Dave. Do you do? Okay, but now I'm listening. I'm focused. I'm focused. I promise. No, no, I'm listening. The thing is, I need to send you a document and it's very important and very sensitive. Okay. So I'm gonna make sure that when I send it to you, I use end-to-end encryption so I don't get caught.