 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 780 for Monday, September 16th, 2019. Thanks, folks, and welcome back to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap. Or if it's your first time listening, welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap. And if it is your first time listening, you should know that this is the show where people send in you. In fact, send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, all of the things that come up either to help others or to get help for yourself. And then we mix it all together, formulate it into a bit of an agenda, and once a week, or sometimes twice a week, we get together and talk through it and help solve all the problems that we can, with the goal being that every single person, us included, leaves every week having learned at least five new things. Sponsors for this episode include MintMobile.com slash MGG and Linode.com slash MGG. We will talk about those in more detail momentarily here. But for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. How are you today, Mr. John F. Brown? I got my Duncan here. Duncan? Oh, that's it. That is, that is a, I'm not a coffee drinker, so I, but I, I think Duncan is mostly a, you know, east of the Mississippi kind of thing, right? Pretty much. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I got some at the store. Got it. Well, that's, yeah, that's generally where it goes. Now, yeah. All right. So you, you're, I didn't even, I guess of course you have a Duncan near you. Everyone here in New England has a Duncan near them. Of course that's how it goes. I wouldn't know, because even though I've been to your house many times, I don't look for Duncan Donuts. I would like to point out, Monica shared something with us that might be helpful when we're in a conversation like this about Duncan Donuts. And you want to skip to the next thing. Monica says, I was just catching up on episode listening to episode 773 and noticed that you have actual usable chapter marks. Jackpot. I know how much effort that takes, but boy, does it make it easy to jump around the episode. She says, I've been using downcast for years. I also am an overcast user, but I keep coming back to downcast. Sometimes I just want a specific meaty bit. I skimmed in the notes. Again, amazing details. And that's true. Show notes. Mckeekab.com. Otherwise I'd be listening to podcasts in my sleep. I'm so oversubscribed. Again, many thanks for the hard work you put into the podcast. Well, thanks, Monica. Thanks for saying that. Thanks for reminding us about the chapters. It's interesting. I was actually asking in the post show after the last show for the folks in the chat room at Mckeekab.com. If the chapters were useful for you folks as listeners, we're not going to stop doing them. Even if you say, no, we never use them. We're not going to stop. We have actually created a workflow where the chapters are not terribly difficult to do. And it does help us kind of keep track of things as well. So we will continue doing them. But I am super glad to hear that they are usable for you in your podcatcher of choice. In fact, Apple's podcasts app also supports chapters. So you should be able to get them everywhere, which is good. Which is good. Yeah. And hey, they're helpful for post-production. If you don't want to go through the entire podcast to look for that one little thing. It's like, where did I hear that? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. No, it's good. Works for me. Yeah. And I did mention the show notes on the website. We put all the links, including chapter markers in the show notes on the website. So you can click through and find what you're looking for. If you are interested in ensuring you don't miss anything, go to our website, mackeycap.com and subscribe so that you can to the email that's there. And that way you will get the show notes delivered to your email box every, pretty much the day after they are published or sometimes the day that they are published, depending on how the timing works. So yeah, good stuff. Sweet. All right. John, you want to take us to Lee? We've been talking about clipboard managers and you've got notes from two listeners that each have another way to share. Yeah. Some good follow-ups. There's a ton of them out there. None of which I tried yet, but I should. So anyways, Lee says hello. There's been a bit of discussion about clipboard managers as of late. So I thought you should know about this gem in the app store. Copy, M, paste. It's $14.99. And Lee thinks it's worth it. It lets you configure as many clipboard lists as you need, switch between them, copy, paste by a clicking or keyboard. It accepts text images, final cut clips, audio, search for clippings, everything. It also syncs across Mac iCloud accounts, but not iOS. It also lets you sort each list independently as shown. So I think it meets most use cases. The preferences are extensive and include appending, prepending extra text, transforming existing text, upper-lowercase capitalization, screenshot, screen that capture, dedubing, et cetera. I use it for managing lists of metadata all day, every day. The developer is responsive and updates come regularly. I've used other clipboard managers, but this is my own question favorite. I don't even look for others anymore, although I suppose that means I might be getting caught, but I doubt it. Cool. Thanks, Lee. That's great. Yeah. So yeah. And then you had another one from Fabian too, right? Okay. You put the link there. Yeah. He didn't include the URL, but we did. And then Fabian. Whoa. My list changed here. Yeah. He just deleted something and scared me. I deleted Lee's note. We got to archive that stuff, man. We're moving forward. Yeah. But it makes everything else move. And then I lose focus. So anyways, Fabian says, greetings from Singapore. Well, greetings from the United States. Singapore. Never been there. It's nice. In 777, a listener Matt was looking for a clipboard manager that works as a stack and listener Felipe recommended clip revolver. Another great alternative is copy clip to from FIP lap. Never heard of them. Okay. I don't know. FIP lab. I'm sorry. Okay. That was a typo there. Okay. Well, thanks for the suggestions and maybe I will try them out. I think, like I've said many times, it's one of those things that if you're not using one, you don't necessarily see the use for one. And then once you have one and have found a way to integrate it into your workflow, it becomes indispensable. Which, you know, which is kind of how these things work. We also talked about places to sell your used Apple devices, Max iPhones. And in the wake of Gazelle, I mean, they still exist, but it doesn't seem like any of us has had a good experience with them recently. Certainly nothing that compares to what they used to be like. And so we've got a couple of those. Listener Steve wrote in with reminding us of sellyourmac.com, which yeah, of course, I can't believe I missed that one. We just interviewed Brian Burke, the founder and CEO of that over on our small business show. So yeah, sellyourmac.com. Absolutely. I'm sure we've seen them at a past show. I'm sure. Oh, you know, he's been around forever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We just we just weren't thinking about it. So I'm glad this is why we do this. This is why we do this show because we all learn things, even things that we learned and forgot. So there you go. Yeah. And here's another one from listener Dave. And he kept it short and sweet. For the Geek Challenge in episode 778, Climen, K-L-Y-M-E-N may not look fancy, though I've used it three times with 100% success, quality service and higher returns than Gizelle. So I wonder if that's the name of the guy that runs it or something. Oh yeah, it might be. Yeah, I've never heard of Climen before, but you know, there you go. Listener Dave has and he likes them. So there you go. Is this good? Is this good? You want to... We've got one last tip that's kind of a follow-up from all this. I will... Actually, it's separate. It's a separate follow-up. So while we're on the subject, and we'll talk about phones and all that stuff, but I wound up using Apple's Trade-In if they... Because we have some old iPhones around. We have an extra iPhone 7 and an extra iPhone 6S Plus that we need to... That we don't do anything with, and they are not our spare iPhone. So I put them on our Apple Trade-In list because we're actually ordering two iPhones, or we did order two iPhones. We've got two coming on Friday. We've got an iPhone 11 and an iPhone 11 Pro showing up. So I figured I'd use that to try out Apple's Trade-In. The values that we got for them were higher than what anyone else would offer us for these phones. We'll see if the actual value paid once we send them in matches, and if so, I'll... Well, either way, I'll report back. There you go. Did you order an iPhone yet, John? No. Mr. Braun, so why not? Actually, I'm looking... I've gone to Trade-In with Verizon for the last several phones, and I'm not quite at the point where I can trade it in without... You've got to be at least halfway into your contract, and I'm not quite there a couple of more months. Got it. So you're just gonna wait until that point and then do it? I mean, you know, when we talked earlier about it, I don't really see anything really compelling. And I still don't like losing touch ID, but... I mean, the camera looks spiffy. The camera always gets better, but other than that, nothing really struck me as a must-have versus what I have now. You know what I'm saying? I've seen a lot of people say they're gonna skip this one because they don't see a big difference. Yep. Yeah, I do. I mean, from the standpoint of what we do here, at least one, I would think that both of us would want to have the current model phone to be able to answer all these questions. But yeah, I do get that. There's not... Well, I'm actually quite happy with my iPhone XR. The one thing that I've sort of missed with the XR, because I went from the... I got the X, and then instead of getting the XS, I got the XR. And so going from having two cameras, you know, on the... two back-facing cameras down to just one on the XR meant that there were certain types of pictures I couldn't take, and it definitely was a downgrade from the camera standpoint. I'm glad to see that they've reintroduced that into the, essentially, the XR's replacement or successor, I should say, which is the iPhone 11. So that is interesting to me. And, you know, stepping down from the OLED screen in the XR, honestly, that didn't really bother me. I noticed it, but it was simply something I was aware of, not something that I missed, if that's a, you know, a good way of saying it. So yeah, I think we're gonna... I think Lisa's gonna take the XI, and I'm gonna take the XI Pro, but I'm not entirely sure that I might actually want the XI, because I like my XR. So, let's see how it goes. Yeah. Well, she does a bit more photography than you, when you say. A lot more, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So yeah, I think she could give that thing a workout. Yeah, yeah. So, but ours will be here on Friday, so we'll have all kinds of conversations about that. Am I gonna have to get a new case? Is it easy? Every time. Oh, yeah. Seven to the eight, I was able to... The seven and the eight were the same size, so I didn't have to get a new case. The 10s are all different form factors, so yeah. Yeah, great. Well, even going from like a XR to an 11, same form factor with one exception, the camera. And so I don't think 10R cases would fit on the 11, and 10S cases definitely won't fit on the 11 Pro, with that, you know, three-camera array that's back there. So, yeah. Yeah, you just need a new case. So, it's fun though. It's a time to get a new case. Like, honestly, from what we've seen here around the house, I wouldn't recommend keeping the same case on your phone for more than a year, because they do tend, even the, you know, like the spec cases, which I really like and find to be super protective. I mean, you know, I think I've told stories about how my daughter dropped her phone from the top of a roller coaster, and it like bounced down through the, you know, the guts of it and landed on the ground, and in her spec case was literally, you know, unharmed. But those cases take a beating, and over time, that beating can compromise their structural integrity, especially around the edges, right, where you kind of need it to be a little soft. Oh, I had that happen. Yeah. So, I have for my aid, I have, I like the clear case, because you can still see the, you know, the apple on the phone and stuff. But, yeah, one of them, one of the joints, if you will, or, you know, little pieces just broke. And, you know, I went to, when I was at the next show, I'm like, yeah, it broke, and they're like, yeah, it happens. You know, I mean, the plastic degrades over time. Any plastic does, or most plastics do. Yeah. So, and I think they've warrantied for life. So, you know, if your case falls apart, make sure you go with somebody that stands behind their work. Well, and just replace it. Like it's, I think it's realistic to expect to replace your case at least once a year, maybe more frequently than that. So, you know, that part doesn't bother me about getting a new phone. It's like, yeah, okay. If I'm the type of person that keeps a case on a phone, I will want it replaced. Yeah, and I am that type of person. I know there are many people that are not, and that's also fine. Yeah. Yawvel. All right. All right. One last tip, and then there's something about these new iPhones that are arriving on Friday that I want to talk about that's going to impact a lot of us. So, but take us to this last tip here, John, before we go. Okay. Just as a good one here. This may be too niche, but for those people who don't want to pay for Zapier, I use this great Zapier. Yeah. I use it. What is a Zapier? Well, it's a tool. Yeah. I use this great workaround for Wufu and Google Sheets. It's basically a web book and a pre-made script. I use it every year for kids after school. Club signups. Oh, nice. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Cool. All right. So, so she's got a link for us or something. Yeah. So we got, yeah. So it's a article. So we'll, we'll link to that. Cool. That's awesome. Awesome. Yeah. I love this stuff. Yeah. Cool. Um, all right. I want to take, um, we, I do want to talk about this thing that's going to affect if you're a Dropbox user and you're getting a new iPhone, there's a conversation we need to have and we're going to have it. First, I want to talk about our first sponsor, which is Mint Mobile because this is freaking amazing. You know, it's, it's rare that something comes along that truly kind of changes the way I think about, you know, it's something I've been using for a long time, but Mint Mobile has done that with wireless service, right? Because the big wireless providers here, especially now in 2019 have expensive retail stores, inflated prices, hidden fees, and many of us are being taken advantage of because these providers know that we'll pay and this is the opportunity that Mint Mobile has seized upon because they provide the same premium network coverage they're used to. 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So to get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free and get their seven day money back guarantee, go to mintmobile.com. that's mintmobile.com slash mgg Cut your wireless bill down to 15 bucks a month. One more time at mintmobile.com slash mgg do like we've done. Check it out. All right. So, John, J.P., let's let's let's let's have some J.P., o. Yeah. Well, yeah, actually I'm going to start with Paul here because Paul Paul's is the one that that gets us kind of into this conversation here. Paul says, I'm currently trying to get an answer from Dropbox to an issue that has arisen in relation to their relatively new three device limit imposed on basic aka free account holders. I've had a basic account with Dropbox virtually since its inception. I have only modest needs for the service and quite happily accept the three device limit. My Mac, iPad and iPhone are all linked to my Dropbox basic account. I use carbon copy cloner to clone the internal boot drive on my iMac Pro. The other day I test booted my Mac from the clone drive. The boot process proceeded smoothly then at one point Dropbox asked me to log in. On completing the login however, Dropbox informed me that I had exceeded my three device limit. In order to access my Dropbox account while booted from the clone drive I had to unlink one of my three existing link devices, one of which was the Mac I was currently using. It seems Dropbox deems a single Mac to be two unique devices when booted from two separate but identical or cloned drives. Can you shed any light on this? Yeah, Paul, and it's a good question. The way I've experienced it over the years, this particular way of treating things is not new for Dropbox. It's just that their three device limitation now makes it matter because over the years, anytime I've logged into Dropbox from a new boot drive on my Mac, it sees it as a new drive to sync to. And honestly, I think that's smart. You know, Dropbox is syncing your data back and forth. If it notices anything different about the destination of that data, I think it's good to ask you and say, whoa, okay, hey, something has changed here. I just don't want to blindly start syncing data because it doesn't know that it's the same drive. In fact, it very much knows that it is not the same drive and it can't know that it's just a clone, right? So I think it's really smart that Dropbox uses probably the unique drive identifier. Is it a UDID or a UUID, John, on the disk? I can't remember, but some unique identifier of the disk, whatever the right term is for it here, that's what it uses so that it knows if things have changed. Yes, you're right. So there are two UUIDs, but I think I see where you're going with this. So there's a volume UUID, which is applied to a drive. But your machine also, and you can find this in the system info, there's a hardware UUID. So there's a unique identifier for both the machine and the drive, and it sounds like they're not entirely... The device should be the machine, not the drive, but it sounds like they're considering the drive. I actually disagree. I think the device should very much be the volume's UUID, not even the drive's UUID because, again, you don't know... They have no way of knowing if whether or not the volume has changed, and it's the volume that matters before they start blowing away your data or syncing the wrong stuff to the cloud, et cetera. I think that's pretty good. Now, with this three-device limit, this is a problem because it causes exactly this. Now, when I upgraded my iMac this summer in the office, I cloned, but prior to cloning, I divested myself of my dependence upon running the Dropbox client on my Macs. And I did this with all of my Macs, so I am no longer running the Dropbox client app on any Macs whatsoever. But I still need to remain synced to Dropbox, and the way that I do that is through Synology Drive. Synology Drive is their name for... Actually, it's a suite of tools, but the one of sort of the main leading one is their Dropbox-like private cloud client. So I run the Synology Drive app on my Mac, and it syncs with my disk station wherever I am. It can do it locally if I'm on the same network as the disk station, of course, and then remotely if I'm not. In fact, John and I share a folder on Synology Drive, and mine, at least currently, is syncing because I'm locally because I'm local, and John's is syncing remotely because he's not local. It all works very, very well. They've had this tech for many years, and they've really ironed out the kinks, and they've really paid attention to what works well for Mac users. So that part of this is solved. Now, Synology also has another piece of tech that runs on your disk station called Cloud Sync, and what Cloud Sync does is it logs into your cloud services, in this case Dropbox, and it syncs itself with Dropbox. Now there are two benefits to this. Number one, if you link the two things together, you have Cloud Sync syncing your disk station to Dropbox, and then you point a folder on your Mac at your disk station and sync that with Synology Drive, well now you can sync any number of devices to that folder, which is a up-to-date synced clone of your Dropbox folder without dealing with Dropbox's limit. So that's one benefit. And the other benefit is that doesn't even act as one of your three devices because it's not Dropbox's client that's running, it's Synology's client that's running. So that may well change someday, but it is just treated as something that's logged in, not something that is a device, which means it leaves three devices open. I do the same thing on my iPhone and my iPad where I don't have them logged into Dropbox anymore. I just have them doing the same thing and I can use Synology Drive to access the sync data. But there is one iPad, the one that I use for all my theater stuff. I play drums and some theater productions, and actually not just theater productions, even in rock bands and stuff. Dropbox is often the shared resource that's used amongst everyone, and I find it mildly more convenient to have the Dropbox app installed on that device. Just in order to keep things, frankly, I don't know that it even matters anymore with how well Synology Drive is integrated into Apple's files app and everything. I could probably disable Dropbox and wouldn't even notice it. But there's a few apps that I use that have direct Dropbox integration in them for like charts and scores and sheet music and things like that, where having the Dropbox app on the device makes life easy. But it's great because that's the only device that Dropbox sees as logged in. So if you have a disk station and any Synology Disk Station can run Synology Drive and Cloud Sync, you're good to go. I know you have a disk station, John, and we also know that there's the many layers to the onion that is the disk station, and none of us are doing everything that any disk station could do. At least I haven't met anybody that's doing everything. So I'm just curious at what level you're doing that stuff. Are you doing any Cloud Sync or anything like that? Not with the Synology. I mean, I'm using their Drive, so I'm syncing the contents of one of mine using Drive, so just a one-way thing. Oh, interesting. So you're treating it more just as a backup? Yes. One way from your Mac to your disk station? Yeah, so my home folder, I push that to the Synology. Ooh, that's interesting. So, now do you push that to your Synology's Drive, main Drive folder, or to like a shared... Like, because that's... So there's your main... When you connect to Synology Drive, you get one... There is one folder that's set up as your home folder on your Synology, just for Drive. And by default, that's what syncs to any other device that you choose to log in and sync to Synology Drive. So in that sense, I don't think you'd want that to be your home folder. I think you'd want to put your home... If you want to sync your home folder somewhere, I would think you'd want to do that somewhere else, so that if and when you choose, say, to log your laptop in to Synology Drive, it doesn't start trying to sync your entire home folder down. It's akin to syncing your whole home folder to Dropbox in its default configuration that could be fraught with issues, potential issues. You know what I mean? I think the intention... Obviously, there's nothing... There's no wrong way, but the intention is for the Synology Drive folder, the main one that's assigned to each account to be a subfolder of your MaxHome folder similar to how Dropbox is, if that makes sense. Yeah, I guess you could do it that way. Well, that way, you can share data amongst multiple machines without having... You know, without having the issue of, say, syncing your preferences and your library folder and all of that extra stuff. Yeah, well, I'm just doing it from one machine. Right, right, right. But now you're limited and you can't do it from multiple machines. You could because you could create what Synology calls shared folders, which then can be shared with, frankly, with anyone and that's what we're doing with Mac Geekab stuff. But yeah, interesting, interesting. Very cool. Hey, JP has... Well, JP has something to share here. Our description hasn't shined the appropriate light, maybe JP's. Fellers, JP from California just reporting in that I am the successful new owner of a Synology disk station that I have loaded with giant six terabyte wolf pack drives. Wolf pack, I like it. And I am replacing my Dropbox system with the server sync, whatever the heck it's called. Synology drive. That Synology offers. I thank you for the years of talking about it and after an exchange with Dave, realizing it was a perfect replacement because Dropbox is pissing me off lately with their removing custom folder icons and other things. So I switched a little wonky to get it going but now I understand the system after looking at how it works and then trying to figure out where they're coming from and now I get it. So I have it on my laptop, my iMac and I will probably get it on all my devices, including the app for the phone. I figured it out so far, so good and it'll pay for itself within a year because I was paying big daddy bucks for the giant business terabyte Dropbox. I think it was paying like 400 or 500 a year and this thing will, you know, within a year and a half the cost will pay for what a one year of Dropbox would. So thank you very much. I like that my files are not on someone else's server and once I get another Synology in my New England location I will then feel like I have off-site redundancy should something ever happen to one of my dwellings. Alright, that's it. Thank you again, cut me off. Thanks JP, you are welcome. I'm glad that that's working out for you, man. Yeah, it's, yep. You know that we are Synology fans here but we're not just fans, we are people that actually use them and love them, so it's good. And as JP pointed out, it turns out Dropbox is now pulling or cleansing your Dropbox folder of any custom icons that are in there while Dropbox is running. They are still there but is filtering them. I guess it's the right way to say it's not cleansing them, it's filtering them. And that is what led to him saying, wait, alright, I've had it with Dropbox. What's this, tell me about this Synology thing again. And that's kind of how this always starts for someone, for any of us included here, is like, okay, what problem can this solve for me? And for a lot of us, it's the Dropbox problem, either not enough storage or some feature or don't like your data somewhere else, et cetera, et cetera. Once you get there though, and I know JP will be digging into Plex and all of that other fun stuff too because it's all right there at your fingertips. It's pretty amazing. I got my dad set up with Plex this week and just taught him how to log in and then sent him an invite to our library and he got his Roku TV set up on Plex and he called, I said, you know, he had to find the remote for his TV so he couldn't find that while we were on the phone. He's like, of course, as soon as I have the phone, the remote's right there. He's like, I just didn't see it. I was like, yeah, okay. But he called me like five minutes later after he got his TV set up and he's like, this is terrible. I can see every movie you have by sitting on my couch. I don't even have to get up. I'm like, yeah, that's the whole idea. So it's pretty cool. All that stuff can kind of just work, which is good. Listener Joe has anything, any thoughts on this to share, John, before we move on to Joe's very related, but next question. No, I'm a big drive fan. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. Joe writes, he says, I'm looking for a solution for a client who has multiple offices and wants to be able to share files. I was thinking Synology Drive might be a good solution, but was wondering how it handles file locking, i.e. what happens when multiple users try to access the same file at the same time. He says, I also see on their website that they have their own suite of Synology Office apps to edit documents simultaneously in a web browser. He says, but my clients will want to continue using Microsoft Word and Excel for that. Okay. Yeah, no problem, Joe. So Synology Drive certainly can be used to share files amongst a team. And we just talked about how John and I are actually doing that. In fact, we took the two minutes that it took this morning to make sure John was synced up the right way with my distation. Actually, he already was. He just needed to point the folder and it was good to go. Synology Drive, though, you know, there's nothing magic about it. And so if the app that you're running does not support multiple people editing the same file, which generally speaking is every app that's going to run on a desktop computer and write directly to a file. Now, there are client server things like FileMaker or whatever where that's a different case. But even there, you can't both point at the same FileMaker file on a file server. You have to point to a FileMaker server in order something has to be the thing managing the file and then putting the data in and out and being sort of the traffic cop, if you will. But Synology Drive is smart enough to notice when two people have edited a file and it will create a second, it calls it a conflict copy because it can't know how to merge data inside of any random type of file that you might choose to store there. So it just says, oh, hey, two people edited this before everyone had all the changes synced so here are the two conflicts and it names the conflicts after, you know, it would name it like, you know, John's Mac Mini, you know, it would be like Episode 780 Image, John's Mac Mini, and then one would be, you know, Episode 780 Image, Dave's iMac Office. And that way we would know, oh, okay, we both were editing the image for today's episode. All right, let's, you know, now at least neither one of us lost work. Now we have to sort of decide how we have to fight it out and decide whose image wins, you know, that kind of thing, but at least we've got all the work. So that's how that works. Does that make sense? Am I making any sense at all today, John? Usually, yeah. Okay, let's try. But I don't always succeed. Sometimes I get too deep down my own rat holes, so. All right, the question that always should end this kind of conversation, and we will, at least for now, be, oh, well actually, KiwiGram has a good thing. So we will address KiwiGram's concern before we get to the question that we'll wrap up this conversation, which is which disk station to get, and today we're going to focus on which two-bay disk station to get, just to kind of narrow that down, because that tends to be where most people start. But KiwiGram in our chat room says, Dave, make sure you differentiate between sync and network access. And KiwiGram is very smart about that, because what sync is doing is just like with Dropbox, it is taking the contents of the files on a server over there, and syncing them with your Mac, and then, in theory, other people's Macs. Network access, where everyone is looking at the same file server at the same time, is different from that. And Synology allows you to do either or both. I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing both simultaneously to the same folder of data that could start to get really interesting. But if you manage it right, it would be fine. But yeah, and if you're, the syncing is where two people could edit a file and not know the other is editing it on a file server that's just direct network access where you're all on the same local network or even remote network, and all just accessing a file on another computer as opposed to a file that's been synced to yours. And that's the differences. Are you writing to the file over there or are you writing to the file locally here and then something else is syncing it? But if you're writing to a file over there, someone else could be writing to that same file. And again, depending on the app that you're running, that may or may not work out okay. But that would work better than syncing locally if you're going to have multiple people editing the same files. So thank you for that, Kiwi Graham. Any more thoughts on that one, John? No, it's good that it handles. Yeah, it's got to handle conflicts. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, because we know some things don't like we keep warning people about photo libraries and iTunes libraries and stuff like that. Right. It gets squirrely. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yep. All right. And then to take us to Douglas, he says, I have a one bay Synology DS 116. And according to the Plex compatibility chart, this model does not support either software transcoding or hardware transcoding. However, all the media files I have on my distation are standard video files playable by my Apple TV or Mac or iPhone. If they are all playable by the destination devices and wouldn't need any on the fly transcoding, will Plex still work? And then the big question, if I were upgrading, which would you recommend? So for the first question, I think with Plex, I'm not sure if it will install on a distation that's not built to do even some level of transcoding. But if you can get it installed, then yes, it would work. And I've seen Synology's own video station do exactly what you're looking for and video station is their own version of a Plex thing. It's not quite as full featured, but it's actually quite functional. And it will let you run it in a non-transcoding thing. Transcoding means that you've got the video in one format and the device that you're playing it on needs or wants it in a different format. Usually a smaller format or something that will take up less network bandwidth to stream to it if you're streaming remotely and that sort of thing. So that's why transcoding matters because the nice part is you could store your movies in a super high quality format, perhaps even a lossless format on your disk station because you've got those big Mondo Wolfpack drives like JP. He was really talking about the iron wolf drives. But I like Wolfpack. So you got those Mondo Wolfpack drives. You just throw all your Honkin movie files out there and then when you want to stream them, say to yourself in a hotel room, it's like, well, yeah, my iPad could play that Honkin movie file or my Mac could play it, but the bandwidth isn't there to support getting that to me in a real-time capacity, so better to have it transcoded by the disk station and sent, or the server, in this case the disk station, and sent over. And the same would be true if you wanted to put it on your iPad for like offline viewing on an airplane or something. You might want it to be transcoded down so as not to take up more space than you need because you aren't going to really see the difference on that smaller screen. But I'm not sure if Plex will install on an incompatible device. Any thoughts on that, John, before we get to any recommendations? No, that's a good question. Yeah, it's worth trying. We're going to have like a light version. Well, Plex is free. But no, I know that the Synology, yeah, will typically not show you, like for example on my older one, it doesn't even show me the virtual machine manager because it's too wimpy to handle that, so. Right. It doesn't even find it if I search for it. Well, I searched for it and it didn't show up and I'm like, well, that's weird. And then when you go to the page for the for a lot of the packages, it'll say, oh, well, no, I only run on these and mine was not one of them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Cool. All right. So if I if for a new unit, there are three two bay disc stations that I would look at right now. The DS 218 play and I've got these in the show notes. In fact, I've even got a comparison chart ready to link to already in the show notes. DS 218 play, the DS 218 plus and the DS 718 plus. So the DS 218 play is the least expensive. But if you look at the chart, you can see all three of these have a hardware transcoding engine. I figure most people that are listening to this show will start with doing some, you know, Synology Drive style syncing like we've been talking about, but probably very quickly get to a point where you want to do some sort of media management and so having that engine to transcode your video can really make a huge difference. And all three of these have it. But the DS 218 play DS 218 plays engine is the weakest of the three. It won't do H.264 video and it's got some limitations on maximum resolution and that sort of thing. But it's functional and it could get the job done. The biggest problem with that one is that it's limited to one gig of RAM and is not at least not officially upgradable. The other two have a more powerful hardware transcoding engine which is good because they will allow you to do full H.264 and H.265 and all of that stuff and they come with two gigs of RAM upgradable to six. And that will make a huge difference in terms of what you can run on your disk station and how responsive it is. Two gigs is sort of the bare minimum I think that most of us would need. I tend to run mine with either six or eight gigs of RAM but really you know two is enough one is going to be stretching it. Anything less than one and it will be you will find it unresponsive or slow to respond. I don't want to say unresponsive but slow to respond often. So in these scenarios and the difference between the 218 Plus and the 718 is the processor. It's a dual core versus a quad core. They're both celerons so you're getting some decent CPU out of it without spending a fortune. The DS218 Plus is the generally the one I recommend for most people and has worked out really well for a lot of folks. I see it on Amazon for the DS218 Plus for $290 right now and that's diskless. And the DS 718 Plus is $399 right now for the extra CPU and maybe a couple other extra things too. So I will link to that in the show notes too because I think that's a good place for a lot of people to start. Thoughts on that, John? Nice. Yeah. No, I think you made a Yeah, I'd like that they have a tool that lets you Yeah, I think you use their tool to put some side by side so you can Yes. See what's best for you. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's the only way I mean, I don't try to memorize these things anytime. I mean, I kind of have my go-tos that I've done. I've answered the question enough that I, you know, have a working knowledge, but it changes all the time and they have a lot of different units. They are you know, it's kind of like the performance days with Apple where it's like, oh yeah, too many options guys, let's narrow it down a little bit. But you know, yeah, it's good. All right. John, you want to take us to Michael? Yeah, let's uh, let's get Michael going here. Okay. Michael's got a good one, which is on page two. Is it on page two? I don't know. That's how the PDF got made. Yeah. Yeah, I noticed that one apparently. It happens all the time. Actually, yeah, it's I don't know what it is. We print, we print our we take your emails and and before we send our replies to you, we save them. We use the print to PDF functionality and then I built a little I guess it's an automated workflow. I don't even remember how I built it anymore, but it takes it and gives you the ability to title it and puts it into Evernote, which is what we share our those files with and then also puts it on the title on the clipboard so you can just paste it into our agenda document. For some reason, printing an email to a PDF often but not always an unsent email to a PDF often but not always yields a blank first page. So this is how it goes. It's crazy. That's how the sausage is made folks. Anyway, yeah. So Michael says I hope your end of summer is going well. It's still kind of summer here. But it is the end. We've got what a week left week and a half. And here's the deal when I send an email to my boss mail on my Mac defaults to my boss's home email. This has caused her to notify me on more than one occasion to please use her work email address. She seems to have misplaced more than one email this way which does not make me or her happy. How do I stop mail from auto populating her home address and instead use her work email two ways you can do this I have a preference for the second but the first one is a so Apple actually addresses this issue in their help for mail and one of the topics is avoid using the wrong email addresses in mail on Mac. And basically what you do here is you identify and one of the preferences you identify what are what we'll call good email domains like Apple dot com or Mac Observer dot com or Mechicab dot com Yeah, you could do that. I did. Yeah, I did that on one of my Macs a while back. I'm not sure why I did it but it was messing around with it and it's actually really nice. It will highlight in red any email addresses in your to CC or BCC fields that are not part of your preferred domains or, you know, whatever that is it's just, you know, it's like oh, yep, this is external for you know, however you find it and that can be super handy. So, yeah. Yeah, so you could put the good email domains in the list and then if you enter an address and it doesn't match it it'll be highlighted in red which will catch your attention saying hey, you're sending to the wrong address. But that could be a pain because I wish they had a way where you could reverse it rather than having to put all the good domains you could just put bad domains if you know what I'm saying. Well, you know, you could just put the domain and you don't want to send to and it will look different it highlights in red anything that's in that list. So you could just learn that red is good as opposed to red is bad, right? Red just means not on the list. So that could be you know, a white list versus a black list or a red list versus I guess it's a red list versus a black list, right? Or whatever gray charcoal gray list because I think that's what colored mails addresses are as some almost black color. Anyway, so you could do that like there's nothing stopping you from that from using that functionality slightly differently. But I think there's a better way, right, John? I'd like to think so. Oh, man. Get out here. Okay. Here we go. So the second one another article that they have is called delete email addresses in mail on Mac. That's kind of misleading because you're not really deleting. Oh, yeah, I guess you are. But here's the deal. Mail tries to be smart and populate the to field with what it thinks you want based on past use. But it's not working in your case because I guess the addresses are too similar. So what you can do is remove what we'll call the bad addresses from the previous recipients list and that's actually in the window menu I think in mail. It is, you're right. And it's even searchable which is even better because it can get a little bit out of control to try and scroll through it. Yeah. No, I got a ton of things in there. So I'd say either one of those or both should prevent you from doing this. And then pre show, John, you were noting that there is another way to remove an address from the previous recipients list and that's by it just in a mail message highlighting the address and it can be an address you sent it to it can it doesn't matter if it's a to or a cc or a bcc or anything like that or an address that someone sent an email to you from doesn't matter if you float over the address it'll highlight and then you'll have that I call it the reverse chevron whatever which is the little thing on the right that points down to give you the indication that there's a menu you could click here well click that and then one of the options is if it's in your previous recipients list is remove from previous recipients list so you don't even have to go to the window menu and open it up you can just do it right there which is kind of pretty cool so yeah I like it it's good right yeah I don't get that that doesn't show up for me that's weird really not well is it possible that it has for some messages I was going to say is it possible that the addresses aren't in your previous recipients list and therefore there's nothing to remove right maybe oh alright good stuff where are we here where's the time time keeps on ticking into the future here John it's crazy I do though want to take a second actually a few maybe 68 seconds maybe more and talk about our next sponsor which is Linode at linode.com mgg I'm going to cut right to the chase if you need a server you want to use Linode's all ssd based servers even their $5 a month server is ssd based and here's where it gets even better go to linode.com mgg and then use promo code mgg2019 you get a $20 credit to start using linode it's not like you have to pay anything to get that $20 credit that's before you pay anything and as I just mentioned there's a $5 a month plan for what they call their nanode which is their smallest server so you get four months of that for free just because you're a listener to this show and what's even cooler if you like the command line like I do and that's how you prefer to manage a server you're good to go if however you don't want to manage a server that way Linode's also got you covered because they have all of these things in their cloud interface that allow you to pre they've pre-built they've come up with the scripts to build a server to do a lot of different things you know you want a VPN, you want to set up WordPress they've got tons of them and let's say you choose WordPress you just choose it it'll set up all the stuff you need what's your website's name and those sort of things that need to be put in the WordPress config file and then it builds it and it says okay here's your login good to go and you've never touched a command line WordPress everything it needs database, PHP, MySQL all that stuff, good to go to get a check it out linode.com MGG promo code MGG2019 or thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode alright Todd John Todd has a question that might seem questionable to many people but not to everyone and that's sort of the beauty of this he says I'm wildly interested in archiving my old time machine backups I have several old drives that have years and years of time machine backups from several older machines that I am aiming to consolidate the contents of these drives into a larger drive I get it that some people don't care about their older backups I am dedicated to keeping these around I've not used these drives in years so backing them up going forward is not necessary not necessary or a concern backing up to them going forward sorry is not a concern that makes more sense I believe that due to the nature of how time machine creates backups with extensive use of hard links that disk utility won't cut it and ultimately create a disk image many times larger than the actual time machine drive I don't mind mucking around in terminal or even purchasing software that would do this archiving for me in an ideal world these drives would be turned into a disk image or something similar that I can mount if I want to look back into these archives and then the physical drives could be destroyed what are your thoughts I actually think a disk image or very specifically a type of disk image a sparse bundle would work very well and the reason I think this is locally when you connect a drive directly to your Mac and backup time machine to it it will create its directory structure inside HFS Plus and will use hard links to its desire to make it able to have full backups without having extra extra data everywhere that's great and when you're backing up to a network drive time machine creates a sparse bundle over there and you do exactly the same thing except all the hard links and everything live inside that sparse bundle so I would think if you used disk utilities clone option and cloned your drive to a sparse bundle you'd probably get exactly what you're looking for that's my feeling on it thoughts John um I mean I kind of do this well yeah I've told you to backup my backups here but your backups are already sparse bundles right yes yeah and once they're in the sparse bundle but that sort of supports the theory here right that if you're able to move these sparse bundles around without any issue and you are then if he just takes his backup and sort of pours it into a sparse bundle I think that would work I really think you're going to be okay with that and I think disk utility is probably your best tool to do it you could use the terminal disk utility command but I think disk utility is even better well I guess what I'm suggesting is that I use hyper backup and it does versioning of of all the files it packs up including my time machine sparse bundles right right so we got a Synology main would consider that as well I mean I think there's like now there's an even better way right with if you've got a Synology and one that can run btrfs then you can do snapshots of your backup volume just like you can do snapshots on your Mac and now you don't have to have backups of your backup stored somewhere else just do the snapshots boom they're good to go that's what I started doing when we talked about it on the show here couple months ago it's awesome because because restoration is instant and just say oh yeah restore that to you know this snapshot from two days ago and boom it's there done so it's pretty awesome nice mm-hmm all right what do we got here we've got we've got time that is I like that that's good because we have a lot to go through Wesson asks a question about mesh networking and power line he says I need to figure out what he's looking at here he sent us an Amazon link but it's not clickable in the way that I need it to be clickable okay got it okay he says I'm looking at the TP link deco unit that has power line and mesh Wi-Fi built in together he says it comes in a three unit bundle but I think I'd only need two to cover my house he says I'd be curious about this have you tried it and what's the throughput of the power line part of this he says to where I'm moving I can't pull Ethernet cable how important would the power line be as compared to just using the Wi-Fi backhaul of the decos units right there the apartments 1500 square feet two units will be 30 feet apart with three walls in between the aux unit will be connecting to AV equipment TV Apple TV and DVD player via Ethernet okay great and he says also do you know if I go with the power line backhaul units which TP link power line Ethernet adapters would be compatible how can I easily tell which power line units work together the mesh units are rated AV 600 and there's a power line adapter which is also AV 600 okay so here's the thing power line is generally pretty slow some folks have gotten lucky with it and been able to see somewhere real world throughput of you know three to four hundred megabits per second if you've seen more than that out of power line I would love to hear from you feedback at MackieCab.com as good a place as any in fact perhaps even better I try feedback at MackieCab.com well that's option number two and then if option if those first two options don't work try feedback at MackieCab.com and with one of those three you're guaranteed to get through most of the time though with power line you're not guaranteed to get too much through because generally it's going to do about a hundred megabits per second that seems to be what we've all found and sometimes less than that 70 I've seen it range in you know any houses where I've tried it between about 70 megabits per second up to you know just shy of 200 in the best case scenario I don't even know that I've ever seen it get three or four hundred so I'm not sure that there are many use cases where these particular deco units with the power line built into them are going to be helpful that said I'm sure there are some if you're the scenario you describe with three walls but only about 30 feet apart you're probably probably fine with the wireless backhaul where you're not fine as if those walls are say plaster because plaster has to be stuck to a metal mesh and a metal mesh basically builds you a nice little maze of Faraday cages in your home and wireless signals tend not to like to go through things like mesh and other Faraday cage like structures, lattices and things like that if that's the case you have to think about a couple of options one option is yes to use this power line and accept whatever speed it gives you is better than what you could get otherwise that's fine number two is use a different technology power line takes the ethernet signal and sends it across the power wires which is nice because you probably have power wires in more rooms than you do have ethernet so that's why power line certainly used to be really popular mocha is another solution that uses does sort of the same thing over your coaxial cables and a lot of homes have coax in more rooms than they have ethernet in a lot of homes ethernet is in zero rooms and mocha with the right mocha adapters you get the bonded mocha two adapters which I think are the sort of state of the art mocha that's available I get 8 to 900 megabits per second off of really old and crappy coax so that could be one option for you and could be a really good option but another option is your third deco unit because if you do wind up having plaster walls or anything in the way refrigerator, anything big and metal that might block signal or water I guess you could have a water tank in your home think about placement of that third deco unit because straight line between unit 1 and unit 2 or base and remote 1 maybe that's the right way to say it straight line between base and remote 1 doesn't get signal there well what about finding the two other sides of the triangle because if you can place the third unit somewhere where it can have a straight shot to both the base and remote 1 well then the mesh can be smart enough to realize that and route the data that way and that can sometimes help too so there's a lot of different ways to go chances are power line is the least best of those or the most worst I don't know but every home is different it's impossible for us to sit here in our homes and say what's best in your home but mocha is probably best case scenario in my opinion, ethernet number 1 mocha number 2 wireless number 3 power line number 4 maybe that helps paint the picture I'll put that in the show notes too we might have to adopt this would you disagree what are your thoughts on that John? I agree with your ordering because it's roughly in the order of speed speed and reliability yeah yes, alright good good power line great now it's in the show notes order of backhaul preference there we go it's right there live as we type alright cool any more thoughts on that one John? before we move on okay Jeff asks where's Jeff's question to start us into the I think we've got 3 or 4 geek challenges to share here so Jeff starts us long time big fan of the show here in New Zealand, awesome, sweet it says I'm wondering if you can offer some advice regarding the upcoming changes to Apple's reminders in iOS 13 I currently have an iPhone 7 an original iPad Air and a 2009 iMac both the iMac and the iPad Air are running their maximum supported OS's high Sierra and iOS 12.4.1 it is my understanding there are significant changes coming to the Apple reminders database format with iOS 13 and Catalina so I'm concerned that I'm effectively unable to upgrade my iPhone beyond iOS 12 without breaking compatibility with my iPad and my Mac can you offer any clarification on this so I haven't messed with this enough to know but I think that data simply will not sync once you've moved it to your iOS 13 or Catalina device that's it, it will not sync with older devices there were some issues in the beginning of the beta test where I think it was syncing and causing some data loss for people and so they just nixed that I believe that's now how it's syncing I have some thoughts on a workaround though John so but I'm curious and this is definitely in the realm of geek challenge so if you folks know anything please please you know we're looking to kind of tap our hive mind here but any thoughts John no that's the one I don't use reminders I don't know why fascinating so the other solution that's kind of percolating into my head here is Apple's reminders app is not the only way to interface with the cloud the iCloud reminders database you could use an app like busy Cal to manage your reminders in fact that's what I do I store my reminders in the iCloud database but I do not use any Apple client apps to interact with that data and so I would think that if you can run busy Cal on either your old iOS devices or your old Mac devices then you should be able to point that at iCloud and log it in in order for busy Cal to log in it you have to get an app specific password because that's how iCloud works it doesn't have any sort of OAuth style authentication that is usable for outside of Apple apps which is sort of bizarre but if you just go get an iCloud app specific password we'll put a link in the show notes about how to go get that it's it costs you nothing it's easy it's just how it has to work then I think that might solve your problem here so we'll put that in the show notes so cool and Brian Monroe has a link to the best reminder apps for iPhone and iPad from iMore as well so that's yeah it's great busy Cal certainly not your only option it is just the one that comes to mind because it's the one I use but but absolutely there are others that are you know more targeted just at reminders and that sort of thing so yes yes which is good yeah busy Cal being asked in the chat room by Kiwi Graham busy Cal definitely has its own interface to iCloud it's not using on device data that's a really good question because some of these third party reminder apps just look at the data that's on your device and display it in a different format busy Cal connects to your iCloud data separately from the iCloud syncing that's happening at the core of the OS on your phone busy Cal connects using Caldav which is an industry standard protocol it's a little wonky I've done some working Caldav before and it's it's crazy but the busy Cal folks seem to have really kind of mastered it and they connect via Caldav which is why you need the app specific password because you're connecting directly to the iCloud servers and they take your iCloud data and translate it to Caldav so that you can access it from anything so yeah that's that would be the way to do this I think that would be the safe way so cool Caldav have you ever worked with Caldav John? well I'm sure it's on the back end of a lot of the calendars from an engineering perspective did you ever find yourself having to deal with Caldav in your programming days? you're lucky there's like 5 people on the planet that truly understand Caldav and most of them are now retired including the guy Red Dutta who worked at Apple and invented it yeah it's the problem is it became so universal and it's like and it's really wonky to deal with there's no real good libraries to use to you know like frameworks or APIs to just tap into so it's kind of have to write your own or use some you know some existing thing that's you know janky and you got to modify it to all get it's crazy I mean it's just times and dates I mean how hard could it be I agree and people yeah and yet I have found it to be a rat's nest so there you go anyway yeah I do get tickled when I get an invite from someone usually by email for a calendar event and it actually works oh they work well I get them all the time yeah yeah or I see it yeah I think it's an ICS file yeah those tend to work pretty well yeah all right you want to take us to Keith with the question he's got here John yeah good one all right with the announcement that Apple TV plus is going to be included with various products not the Apple Watch unfortunately I figure it's time to upgrade my current Apple TV to the 4k model as that includes the free subscription I've got quite a few apps installed on my current one do you know if there's a way to clone an Apple TV when upgrading so that the new one is set up exactly the same way as the old one almost like migration assistant for the Apple TV I won't be buying until Apple TV plus is launched on November 1st but it'd be good to be prepared yep I think iTunes is out of the so a lot of people use iTunes to clone their backup and clone their i devices but I don't think iTunes is going to work in this case here I'll tell you one thing that may or at least it lists as an option here is that Apple has something called Apple Configurator 2 when you fire it up it says hey Apple Configurator supports iPhone iPad iPod and Apple TV so and it's free the price is right and it can do a backup and restore of your various devices or so they say in the documentation the bad news is that when you look at the description of what they back up apps is not one of them further help they say a backup includes information about the layout on the home screen app data such as Safari bookmarks and calendar events anything you can set in settings on the device certs account types restrictions and contacts and then the next line backups don't include apps or media so I think it would migrate I mean I try migrating you know doing a backup and then restore to the new one and see what that does for you so according to what they say they don't restore apps but I don't think that's been Apple's model for quite a while yeah Apple there is actually a solution to this and we've been doing some digging while you've been sharing this John and Brian Monroe helped point us to something that Apple calls one home screen and the idea is exactly like you might think the same home home screen on all your Apple TVs regardless of whether they're on the same local network they just have to all be logged into the same iCloud account so you log into your Apple TV you go to settings you click on accounts you click on iCloud make sure you're signed in if you're not already and then click on one home screen and turn it on and that will sync your home screen to the cloud and now any other Apple TVs you log in will inherit that and now it's a synced home screen complete with apps and anything else again as long as you're all on the same iCloud account so and then iCloud will restore the apps it's all it's all good so this is a successful geek challenge this is awesome and that's been there since iOS 11 it turns out I had no idea this is like you know I actively learning one of my five new things this is great yeah very good one home screen I like it sweet all right geek challenges we'll get these sorted out we might have so we actually might have solved Jeff's with third-party reminder apps right we've solved Keith's in real time as well let's see if let's see how we do with the other two so Bob one note one follow up I thought this maybe an option but and I tried it but it didn't look like it was but I amazing also we'll talk to Apple TV so they claim when you start it up and they break out and they break out the apps but the thing is when I try doing app related stuff it's like well I'm gonna restore the data but not the app right okay okay yeah because I guess they put restrictions in there but um all right so this is the official Apple way to do it cool yeah I know yeah that seems pretty elegant if assuming it works which I yeah I didn't even I didn't know was there either and I have the 4k yeah unit yeah I know it's crazy I'm gonna set that up once we're done here same I know it's like just well that way just in case something happens if my Apple TV you know like decides to die or something wait a second can I remote into my Apple TV no no I haven't found a way to do that it should be doable but no yeah all right so the next geek challenge Bob asks one of the 32 bit apps that I will miss when I do my transition to macOS Pontiac Catalina is Easy Envelopes by Ambrosia Software he says this works better for me than the Contacts app because I can store multiple return addresses multiple envelope sizes and it prints usps compatible barcodes of course Ambrosia Software is no longer I have not been able to find a substitute yes a hector is sad that Ambrosia is no longer as well but but we safely got her tucked away here at TMO Towers East do you have any suggestions off the top of my head no I don't I don't do a lot of envelope printing other than my own like file maker cooked up thing where I actually have a font that'll do the barcodes and all of that it's actually kind of cool but but no I don't use an app to do it so I don't know John do you know of anything or we are we tapping the community yet again yeah I used to use that program all the time and yeah I'd like the fact that they did barcodes I thought that some of the office suites have a mode that'll do envelope addressing check your word processor and see if they have a template I seem to recall one I haven't done in a while that would actually print out the postal barcode as well which will help speed your mail along yeah yeah in theory I mean there they've gotten so good at scanning and putting a barcode on your mail on their own that I'm not convinced it matters anymore but maybe it does so yeah alright well nobody in the chat room has that one so we will go on to Kevin and see if see where we get with this one too because Kevin asks he says I have a question related to Gmail and spam filtering that I've been unable to find an answer to lately I've been receiving a fair amount of adult spam and he says I haven't really done anything that I know of to cause this to happen I'm sure I've just been harvested yes and also it doesn't matter we are judgment free zone here at least we try to be Gmail is filtering this into my spam folder properly 100% of the time but because either they or Apple Mail occasionally mislabel other emails as spam I do have to review what's in my spam folder before emptying it Apple Mail is good enough to not display the images thankfully but some of the verbiage is so coarse in my opinion that I don't even want to see that I'm actually with you Kevin I feel like after I go through my spam folder I need to go take a shower but he says so what I'm looking for is a preferably server side way to have any emails that are quote-unquote adult spam deleted but other spam messages left there for my review so you okay so he's looking for a layered spam filtering solution what you probably don't know is that your spam filtering is already layered right because there's stuff that is so obviously spam and comes from servers that only send spam that many mailer engines out there Google's is certainly one of them just block them before they ever even make it to a filter that should decide should it go to your inbox or your junk box right so so that's already happening and is one very very good reason to you know to use a service that receives a lot of mail right because they have the ability to sort of heuristically decide yeah okay this is how that's going to go as for something that could filter all the adult stuff out I mean you could create a set of filters on either on Gmail or in your Apple mail but I would do them on Gmail to make it happen server side so you're not so it's not ever making it down to your Mac and not wasting your bandwidth but I would create a set of filters that includes all of the words and language that you know are the things that have this and Gmail is pretty good about it you can say if it's in my spam folder and or if is spam I think is the the verbiage that's used to sort of trigger all this stuff but if is spam and contains you know this word or that word or this word or that word and just do a series of like nested ores inside parentheses so that it like is spam and has one or more of these words just delete it entirely and you could definitely do that I'll put a link in the notes to Gmail's I don't want to call it scripted filtering language for lack of a better term just to just to you know get you there but I think that would work I mean it would require thinking about all these words that are disgusting you but at least one more time but maybe it's only one more time and maybe that's worth it I don't know what do you think John um yeah I find that Google um I look through my spam or junk folder every now and then because it usually gets it right but sometimes it doesn't yeah right right yeah exactly so I think we're still at the point where you do have to you know before you trash your spam review it because something every now and then something legit gets in there yeah but at least this way he wouldn't have to see all those emails that he doesn't want to have to see like if he's certain that if it contains this word and is already classified as spam like I'm good with losing that forever you know that kind of thing that's actually not a bad idea that could make the process of filtering through spam easier although I will say what I do when I go through my spam is I do it on Apple Mail and I sort my spam folder by subject because there I get so many duplicate spam emails that it makes it really easy to scroll through because I'll see oh there's 12 messages or whatever with that almost that exact same subject and so it's like I can skip all of them simultaneously and when they're all grouped together it makes it really easy to find the ones that are standalone subject names and those actually then just sort of stand out to me as the outliers and that's where not always sometimes those are spam too and I let them go but that's where I can look and say oh wait wait wait that's not supposed to be spam so sorting by subject is my is my secret trick there but that's not automated at all obviously it's just me looking at it so yeah so you could try that I don't know anything more on that Mr. no okay cool coolio we have some tips to share the first thing I want to share though is because I've got this new engine that I'm using Zapier for Zapier why did I say Zapier you've got me saying Zapier this is happier that I'm using Zapier for I can really easily make sure I have all of our recent Mackie cab premium contributors ready to go the list is just right here for me and so I want to take a minute and thank those of you whose contributions came in since we did the show with Bob on Tuesday on the $25 by annual plan thanks to David from Chicago Domenico from Holbrook Joe from Redondo Beach and Mike from Tempe and on the monthly $10 plan Joe from El Dorado Chris from Charlie Wood Arie from Kensington Michael from Mission Hills Philip from Tucson Bob from La Pesh Dave from Socrates and Timothy from Hendersonville thanks to all of you and thanks to Paul P for the one-time $20 payment to thank you so much you all rock so thank you thank you thank you and we've got some tips John tips one one quick tip one cool stuff found but you know that's all we have time for you want to take us to Mark or should I take us to Greg no no we got Mark here I'm just a no we just got a trail we got to follow here he was having problems with his mail index and that he wouldn't be seeing recent emails show up when he tried to do a mail search well I guess to wrap it up here he had to he tried using different tools like I think he said he tried Onyx but it wasn't able to cut it either so it's weird yeah I think he was saying it even it would yeah I just said it couldn't do something so he had to roll up his sleeves and and do it manually and we have a link to an article that tells you how to do this but I guess to summarize you go to your home directory library mail v2 or it's probably v3 now mail data and delete any file that begins with envelope index and that's what he did and you may want to make a copy of him just in case yeah never yeah if you're going to do something like this deleting it may be a bit extreme but removing it you know put him in the trash right and then yeah just don't empty it just don't empty it yeah exactly yeah yeah that in theory that's what Onyx does I thought it deleted them I thought it didn't just empty them but maybe Onyx does just empty those files those three envelope index files are the what comprise the SQLite database that manages your mail index and so there's the envelope index file then envelope index.shm which is shared memory and .WAL which I am told is right ahead log so but they are the three that comprise this database and if you delete them then mail just recreates them and sometimes that's the way to solve the problem is nuke it and let it repave and it repaves all by itself so sweet thanks Mark for the reminder on that one that's good oh man how do we get here mine is v6 yeah I was going to say we're way beyond v2 yeah yeah yeah so yeah it changes with every generally changes with every major OS upgrade so I haven't looked in my Catalina test machine yet but maybe we're on v7 so one last thing is from listener Greg who says for cool stuff found I'm a long time user of scanner pro with my iPhone to scan documents but this new update to prismo version 5 from creosede is awesome it has more features and does a better job scanning I also like the exporting options I used to organize my scans in the scanner pro app but now I just export the scans in iCloud into the documents by reedle app I still like reedle's other apps a lot like documents and pdf expert especially the latest update for pdf expert so sweet thanks Greg it's been a while since I've tried prismo I need to I remember very much liking that and I think we probably even mentioned it as cool stuff found years and years ago but I'll have to check that out because I wind up scanning pdf documents with my phone all the time so that's pretty good yeah thoughts on that John um you know I'm gonna maybe toss out maybe a mini geek challenge it was related to one of the questions that we had and I saw that you actually posted a question to me I don't think either of us have a twain compatible scanner oh yeah okay yep now we had a question or commentary from someone who was kind of going on making a valid point in that um you know a lot of scanners tend to obsolete themselves when you upgrade the OS especially the ones that have proprietary things my suggestion was you know try to get a standards compliant one but uh I don't have a standards compliant one but I used to do this yeah I don't know that that's a thing anymore it used to be that there was this technology I mean I think it still exists called twain TWAIN right that that was sort of the the standard scanner tech and if your scanner supported that then it could be scanned from by any twain compatible client and my question is what twain compatible client exists for the Mac well it used to be but I don't think it is anymore but image capture oddly enough I think it might maybe it does still I don't know I mean it sees a camera so it sees a camera so if you fire up image capture and you have your camera connected sure like your phone it'll see that as a input device because it is right as is an image scanner but um but I don't have a twain compatible image scanner I used to back in the day it was a really nice one super high res I was using it for some document security work and that's all I'll say but um but yeah I don't know the state of twain on the Mac anymore I got mixed information depending on where I go um Adobe kind of suggests that there's support for it but other people say oh it's been removed forever so I don't know so if anybody is using a twain scanner with the latest macOS let let us know yeah and if image capture is the only app that would support your twain scanner I would say definitely don't prioritize twain because image capture is functional but that's about it like you're not going to you're not going to make yourself happy using image capture to to do scans it it'll work in a pinch but I don't I don't know I think yeah about it yeah and one of the vendors actually gave that as a you know it's like well why don't we offer a twain thing they're like because there's a lot of stuff you can't do and okay I'll buy that yeah I got it yeah yeah yeah I found a poster post from the Fujitsu people basically saying that they're like we can't do what we do within the confines of twain so we don't support it and that kind of makes sense because it takes time and effort to write a twain driver right it well but also twain is is limited I think making it twain making something twain compliant time and effort and maybe you should spend that time doing doing doing something else yeah exactly exactly all right cool yeah I'd be curious what folks think all right well that definitely brings us to the end now this is the longest episode we've done in a while that's okay because it's what we do it's no problem let's see what do we have we've gotten through everything we've told you how to contact us I want to thank you for listening you can call or text us at 224-888-GEEK that's how that's how our friend JP sent his audio comment in you could also actually he might have used the MacGeek app to do that so go get the MacGeek app it's free download it for your new iPhone and you're good to go thanks to 4335 oh that's right I forgot I skipped right over it thanks John sorry about that that's awesome yes the phone number is 224-888-GEEK which as John pointed out is 4335 that is correct for the alphabetically challenged yes alphanumerically I don't know what is it alphanumerically that doesn't matter thanks to CashFly for providing the bandwidth to get the show from us to you thanks to all of our sponsors as we mentioned in the episode we have mintmobile.com mgglinode.com mgg of course in the podcast marketplace smile at smilesoftware.com podcast otherworldcomputing at maxsales.com barebones.com ero.com mgg mgglinode.com and so many others go check it out maxgeekapp.com always good stuff there we keep it up to date for you yeah what do you think John I think there's another thing we're going to do for you you all and that is we're going to help you to not get caught use it Freddy it wasn't there you know what we need extra help