 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek at episode 759 for Monday, April 29th, 2019. Please, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek of the show, where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, all the stuff that you find, all the stuff that we find. We mix it all together. We try and create an agenda that flows a little bit. The goal, of course, in putting all of this together is that each of us, including us. We each learn at least five new things every single week when we get together here. Sponsors for this episode include LinkedIn jobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. We will talk more about what you get when you go there, but please go there and learn about them. That's part of how that's our job is to get you to take a look at what our sponsors have to offer. And when you do that, it actually really does help us, whether you buy or sign up or not is between you and them, but we would just like you to go take a look. So please do that, LinkedIn.com slash MGG. We'll talk more about it in a moment. I think that's what I got. So here in Chicago, no, I woke up in Chicago. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, with a big, huge list of Game of Thrones and Avengers Endgame spoilers. This is... John Nefron. Yeah. That's right. I haven't seen either of these things yet. I haven't either. I don't even watch Game of Thrones when I hear that it's trying to watch like the latest. I would be like so confused. You would be better off starting at the beginning and you would want some sort of a cheat sheet that tells you who everybody is because there's about 15 million main characters that you are going to need to track throughout it. So I almost equate it to the experience, which I think you had, Dave, of watching Lost, is that Lost was not a series that you could just jump in the middle of and understand what's happening. At least that. Yeah. Yes. So yes, it is like that, except on rails, like to the next level. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like I was saying before, it really helps if you haven't yet done it, go to Machique martin.com.com slash iTunes that's the closest we can get you and then from there you've kind of got to follow the path that Apple lays out for leaving a review, but please go do that. It really does help and we will read some of them, maybe this week, maybe next week, but but we've got And they're they're awesome. So thank you for that. Um, Alright, now let's get into some of this, John because there there's some I think that's the that's why we're here, right? So Craig, Craig wrote us and was looking at the speeds of his SSD. And, and we had quite a bit of back and forth with Craig, which was fine. Craig's actually a premium listener here at Mackie Cab. If, if I'm not mistaken, which I am not. And, and, and he was having some issues where he was testing his drive and he was finding that in one enclosure in his USB enclosure, he was getting USB to speeds. But when connected over Thunderbolt, he was getting. I should say, well, he was getting faster speeds, right? And so the assumption was that this drive was not that the USB enclosure was slowing down his drive. But it turns out he that was not the problem. The USB enclosure was a USB three enclosure. And he had a I'm looking here. A USB C to USB A cable going to this USB three enclosure. Remember, with USB letters describe the shape of the connectors. Numbers describe the speed capabilities. So A to C was the cable because his computer is a Thunderbolt C or a USB C slash Thunderbolt computer and his USB drive external case is USB A. So he got a C to A cable and he plugged in and he's like, yep, USB three isn't fast enough. And I'm thinking, well, but wait a minute, looking at the speeds of the drive, USB three is way more than fast enough, you know, even, even on three point O, which I don't even remember what we call that anymore. It's USB 3.2 Gen one or something. I don't know. I think that I think that's right. But it's like five gigabits per second, right, John? I mean, it's like way faster than this drive was ever going to go. Maximum speed of USB three. However, I think the not a red herring that you dropped here is that there was mention of a USB A connector, which tends to be the old technology. No, no, no. USB A is used for USB three all the time. Oh, right. Right. It totally used for USB three. No problems there. And his enclosure is a USB three enclosure with a USB A port on it, which is very, very common. However, and he had a cable that went from USB C to USB A. Well, guess what? Just because it has a USB C connector on it does not mean that it has the speed capabilities that you would think or want. It had it to have or has. And and it turns out that was the problem. He had a USB two cable that had a USB C port on one end and a USB A port on the other. And that was slowing him down when he replaced the cable with a USB three cable that has C and A on it all was well. And it's it's, you know, sort of to to the to the assumption that you were making, John, about A being slow, you know, it it stands to reason that why would anyone make a USB two cable with a USB C port on it? Like, that's all the new stuff. And the reason is because you might be connecting a printer or something that's way slower, right? You know, like, and so you don't need to pay for the extra whatever they need to put in the cable to make it support USB three speeds. And and so that was the problem. So it was an interesting sort of path of troubleshooting to get to the fact that it was that the cable was working fine. It was just working as design, not as in that is not as preferred. Yeah. All right. So as you said, the shape of the connector does not dictate the protocol. That's correct. And I was starting to go down that path and you fortunately stopped me. Right. All right. So for whatever reason, the chip in there only supports. Right. Forty megabits per second, which is USB two megabits per second. Correct. Yeah. The chip in the cable, whatever, however, that's wired together. So just be really aware, you know, that let let Craig's story be a PSA to us all that when we buy cables, we really need to look at what shape the connectors are, because that's important for where we want to plug them in. And then we need to look at the capabilities of the cable. And that also matters when you're buying a Thunderbolt cable. You can have active Thunderbolt and passive Thunderbolt and you can go anywhere from what? Ten gigabits per second to 40 gigabits per second, depending on what you're plugging in and how you're plugging in and the shape of the connectors look exactly the same. Yes. Yeah. And I see one thing here. So in our chat room, which, hey, if you want to join in on the fun here, you can do this live. And I think the place you want to go to is MacGygab.com slash stream. And our friend Brian asks, the cable has a chip in it. Are you sure about that? And I think I'm not sure about that because of the speed. All right. I mean, it's got some guts in it, but I don't know if it's a if it's a chip or if it's just the way it's wired or or what. Yeah. Well, it just seems to me that it sounds like the devices on both ends are potentially capable of USB three. They are in this kind of conclusion is that the cable is doing something. So that that's the reason I said that, Brian. Yeah. Chip, I think I think we use chip as a sort of a blanket term for whatever smarts or not smarts are built into the cable is that. Yeah. Yeah. So very cool. Thank you, Craig, for for allowing us to well, solve your problem, but but also use you as an example for all of us here, because it really is it's an important thing. All right, let's go to Stylianos here. I hope I'm pronouncing your name right, Stylianos. And he says, over the years, I've heard your tips about buying new Macs and trying to maximize RAM and or processing power to try and future proof your computer. I have an interesting problem at work. I am in a great position to be able to get a new computer every four years, but my budget is limited on this round. I can spend at most two thousand one hundred dollars to twenty one hundred bucks, given that I do not have to worry about long term processing power of my machine, because I will get to replace it in four years. What do you think would be the best purchase? An iMac or a Mac mini? It has to be a desktop. And should I spend more money towards an SSD rather than the Fusion Drive or more RAM? He says, I do a lot of photo editing and Photoshop other than in addition to typical mail web, you know, writing things. OK, so this is a great question, because it really kind of it paints a very realistic scenario from which to look at Apple's current desktop offerings and and, you know, kind of dissect some of these. So my initial thought is that if you can wait and I'm guessing here, but I think about three months. IMAX will hit the 2019 IMAX by then will have hit the refurb store and you'll start to being you start to, you know, see options of those things. If you can't, I mean, I really think like those 2019 IMAX, especially for what you're talking about doing could be a really good thing and would almost perfectly fit that budget when you shave 15 percent off of the sticker price, which is what happens 99 percent of the time in the in the refurb store. If you can't, though, there are a couple of machines that I would look at. The the first is the six core I5 2019 IMAX. I'm not sure I would buy an old IMAX, but we can talk about that just because the 2019 stuff has so many things in it that make it so much better than than the prior ones. But the six core I5 there, I think a one terabyte fusion drive would be OK for you. Eight gigs of RAM gets you to 1999. Then I'd go to crucial or other world computing at MacSales.com and at least double the RAM up to 16. The other option is the six core I7 Mac mini. You can put a five twelve gig SSD in that with six 16 gigs of RAM from Apple is seventeen hundred bucks or sixteen ninety nine. And then and then I've got to pull up what I what I what I put in here. But then for three ninety nine from Monoprice, you can get a twenty seven inch crystal pro monitor, a 4K, UHD display and because you need a monitor for this, I'm assuming that you don't have a monitor and that that so that that gets you to where you were with the IMAX. And and either one of those. I honestly, I think the Mac mini is going to be a little faster. For most things, it's got integrated Intel graphics, whereas the twenty seven inch IMAX has the Radeon Pro GPU. So depending on what you're doing, you might get more processing power out of the IMAX. If GPU stuff is happening, lots for you. I'm not sure, even with photo editing, that the GPU may or may not be taxed in a way that would matter. It depends on the type of photo editing that you would do. So so that's those are my thoughts. I would probably lean towards the Mac mini if you have to make that decision right now. If you can wait three months, that refurb IMAX really starts to look good. So what do you think, Mr. Braun? Here's what I think, Dave, is that I went to the refurb store. And there are some not the very latest IMAX in there, but I did find one that is within the budget here. So let me tell you about it. OK, we can go back and forth here. So they have a refurbished 27 inch IMAX, 3.8 gigahertz quad core Intel i5 with 5K display. Say that again. Give me those specs one more time. And I'll give you some more specs. Twenty seven inch IMAX, 3.8 gigahertz quad core Intel Core i5 with a retina display. OK, OK. In addition, all right. And the price for this is 2039. So it's just within the budget here. But what it also has, it's it has a little more capability, not in the processor, but so this one comes with 16 gigs of Ram, a two terabyte fusion drive. Now, the other thing to remember here is that this is the older technology. So the ports that you're going to get are different. Now, you may or may not be OK with that for personally when I looked at the ports on here. So it has a SD card slot, which yeah, whatever. Four USB three ports and two Thunderbolt three ports. So if you're OK with that mix of ports, this looks to be a good buy. And actually, I maybe I'll order one. That's not bad. So there's more capable. There's three USB A and two USB C ports on that. Is that right? Hold on. Four USB three ports is what it says. So I assume it's the old. So four USB A, right? And then two Thunderbolt three USB C ports. So OK, all right. OK, yeah, yeah. That's not any different, right? Than the current iMac. I need to I thought the iMac had slightly different port configuration, maybe not. I don't think it's that different, but let me look. It's got no, it's the same. It's got it's got four USB A USB three capable ports and two Thunderbolt USB C ports. Yeah, yeah, they didn't that didn't change with the with the the newer iMacs. It's just the inside change. All right. So this is the 2017 machine, right? It has a Radeon Pro 580, which, you know, is a big boy or a more powerful GPU than integrated. So I would peruse the refurb store. Yeah, again, I I. I don't like the 2017 iMacs right now. I just like the speed because speed wise, you're way better off spending your money on a Mac mini. It like like significantly better off spending your money on a Mac mini. Oh, I mean, this is everything. All right. The speed of the CPU was not speed of the GPU, although it's worth remembering that if you need that GPU and and I'm not convinced that Stylianos does. But if you need that GPU, you can for like five, I think five fifty is probably the right price to say you can add an eGPU, you know, and then and then you're good to go. So, yeah, I those 2017 iMacs, they as soon as the like even before the 2018 Mac mini came out, those 2017 iMacs were like I think just were a little weird. And well, but this one, I mean, so it's three point eight, but I think it boosts to yeah, four point two. So I mean, it's but it's only quad core. No, no turbo boost because it's an i5, right? Well, no, it says right here, turbo boost up to four point two. Sorry, you're right. I meant hyperthreading, no hyperthreading because it's i5. It's a quad core i5. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, all I'm saying is it seems a capable machine. It is. It is. I just think for your money, you're you're better off with that Mac mini. Or for your money, the the six core i5 with the brand new one, the 2019 six core i5 with eight gigs of RAM and a one terabyte fusion drive and you can double the RAM because it still has the you know, the iMacs are the same. Right. Whether you get the 2017 or the 2019, you can put third party RAM in. Right. I guess so if we could offer like overriding guidance here. So I mean, I think all the processors kick ass, you know, as long as they're quad core beyond RAM. Personally, I think the next machine I get and I think 16 gigs of RAM is good for anybody. I don't think you have to go. I saw some stuff in the refurb store that had like 64 gigs of RAM. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. Like for most people, 16 gigs of RAM is good. And then, you know, at least a terabyte of this storage of some form, though, don't get a rotational drive. Actually, some of the stuff that they have in the refurb store has a 5400 RPM rotational hard drive. I'm like, dude, are you still doing that? They did that with my last Mac mini and I immediately removed it. I'm like, are you kidding me? Just be careful of configurations where they put like the cheapest, lowest performing drive dumbed down to SATA 2. Let me remind you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, see, that's what I like about the Mac mini is you're guaranteed an SSD internal, right? And the one that I came up with had a 512 gig SSD. In terms of speed, we're comparing. If you look at the Geekbench scores that Mac Tracker shows that 27 inch iMac clocks in at 15,000 the Mac mini clocks in at 24,000. So it's I mean, it's significantly faster in terms of, you know, the processor and the architecture and all that. Yeah. Correct. Correct. Yeah, exactly. Still, I was looking at this machine, Dave, and I'm like, you know, I think I may want to upgrade. Yeah, I would. I would wait a few months and just upgrade to a 2019 off the refurb store. Just then Mac mini. Yes. No, I'd upgrade to a nine. I mean, you could upgrade to the 20. Correct. Once those once those start showing up and check the refurb store for those Mac minis now, too, because I believe those have made their first appearance. There's none there at this very moment while we're podcasting. But that changes all day long. Like the things appear and disappear from that refurb store all the time. So be sure to have to mention if you're going to be shopping for a refurb and I've done this. I did this for the last two refurbs. I got refurb dash tracker dot com. And last I tried it, it basically scrapes the refurb store. It does. You can say, hey, I want this. And it's like, OK, when I find something, I'll let you know. And refurb me or refurb dot me is another place that will do that. It'll shoot an email if if something matching your criteria is notoriously light, they appear and they disappear. Yeah, yeah, hours. Yeah, especially that new one, just because. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's new. Yeah. All right. So there you go. Good, good stuff. I'm going to take a minute here and talk about our first sponsor. If that's OK with you, my friend. Fantastic. Awesome. Our first sponsor today is LinkedIn jobs at LinkedIn dot com slash M G G as a small business owner. I can tell you something that as a small, if you are a small business owner, you probably already know. And that is that the right hire can make a huge impact on your business. Like I have I have proven this to myself in both directions. You want to make sure you pick the right one and not the wrong one. And the question is, OK, right, I get it, Dave. I want to pick the right one. Where do I find them? Well, you can post on a job board and hope that the right person is out there looking for a job. But think about it. How often do you hang out on job boards? Right? You don't want to leave this to chance and you don't want to leave it to just the pool of people that are actively searching for a job. And this is where LinkedIn has what I like to call the unfair competitive advantage, because people that aren't looking for jobs are also there on LinkedIn, participating every day, keeping their stuff up to date, posting. People are there, right? Seventy percent of the US workforce is on LinkedIn. And that means that your opportunity gets in front of more of the right people. And LinkedIn helps you find people who are qualified for your role and ready for something new. It is the best way to find the person who will help you grow your business. And that's why a new hire is made every 10 seconds using LinkedIn. And here's the thing. There's a deal. So hurry over to LinkedIn.com slash MGG. And that's where you're going to get 50 bucks off your first job post. That's LinkedIn.com slash MGG to get $50 off your first job post. One more time with feeling LinkedIn.com slash MGG terms and conditions apply. You've got to check this out. And our thanks to LinkedIn and LinkedIn jobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG for sponsoring this episode. All right, Mr. Braun, let's see. You know, we've got a bunch of cool stuff founds to go through here, John. And I think it's time we do it. Don't you? They've been stocking up here, stacking up, stocking up. Cool, cool. It is cool. I agree. All right. So we'll start with Druski. Druski says a few episodes ago, there was some discussion of format free cut and paste. In my search for a more useful clipboard manager, I discovered the open source fly cut available on the Mac App Store, which is advertised as a clipboard manager for developers. But it works great for non developers, too. He says it allows access to up to 99 separate text items on the clipboard accessible with a keyboard shortcut or up to 40 in its little drop down box in the menu bar, all blissfully free of formatting for easy transfer among applications and web pages. He says, as a website manager for a nonprofit, this streamlines my workflow quite nicely. The app is super small, super simple to learn. And best of all, it's free. He says, I hope this helps someone. I can't imagine that it won't. This is great. Yeah, we'll we'll definitely put a link to this in the show notes because well, that's because that's what we do. But but thanks, Druski. Good stuff. Fun, huh, John? Do you use a clipboard manager yet? No. OK. That's like I ask because I think it I I know for me, it makes a huge difference to have to be have a stack of all the things that I've put on my clipboard and I don't have to think about what's what. I can just go get them and I think it would make a difference for everybody. No, I and I understand what you're saying. Typically, what I do is like a virtual clipboard is I'll. Copy and paste into either notes or stickies. Sure. Sure. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or just go copy and paste. But I've never, at least with the way my brain works, it never occurred to me. Hey, a clipboard manager would be something that would make my life easier. Maybe it will. It's so good to try it. Yeah, I recommend it. Yeah, right. It's worth it. It's worth giving a try. Yeah. Yeah, it's just I like the physical, you know, OK, I know I pasted this. You know, I know I copy this. I know I pasted it. I know it's fresh and, you know, it's not like. Well, that's the beauty is is it's like it's all it's just there. And I use keyboard maestro for mine and I have a keystroke assigned to pop up. Like if I just hit command V, it pays in. It's it's as though everything is the same, right? Command C, Command V. You've copied something and you've pasted the most recent thing. Exactly like it always is. But right. But how do you select something from the past? Right. So I have assigned command shift V and you could do whatever you want. But I've assigned command shift V and keyboard maestro to show me my clipboard history and it comes up and I can navigate it with. OK, I can navigate it with the with the arrow keys up and down. And I can see what's what. And if there's an image, you know, it shows a little thumbnail. All right. Could you do a keyboard equivalent? Like could you type like, you know, two zero or or. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes, you can. Once the list is up, you can say, oh, I want number four and then boom. So you can model. All right. So you're modifying the workflow from. Correct. Right. All right. So it's an enhanced paste workflow. I get it. It's an enhanced paste workflow. That's a great way of looking at it. No, it really is. Like because that's what it is. But then you could do something different. So it doesn't, you know, it shouldn't confuse somebody who doesn't know it's there. If you didn't know it was there on my machine, it would never get. And you'd never know it was there is the right way to say it. It like, I don't notice it's not there until I go copy three things and then do command shift V and nothing happens. And it's like, oh, dang it. Like crap, you know, but that happens so rarely, you know, that. But yeah, no, it's great. Yeah, because it and and the way to think about it. And I know you'll understand this and some people will it's a stack, right? So it it pushes things in to it. And then they just go deeper in the stack and you can just go and pick out of the stack at random, if you like. But yeah, right. Yep. So is it so is it a FIFO stack? It is LIFO last in first out last in first out, right? Because whatever you just copied is what will be pasted if you just hit command V. But if you want something else and you want to pick, you know, that random or not at random, but out of order, just yeah, exactly. OK, I just had that term swimming around in my head. I like it. It's often part of computer science discussions when you're talking about queuing. Correct. Is it first in first out last in last out last in. Yeah, there's like all these different combinations. Yeah, yeah, depending on what order things. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you got it right. Lawyer Jeff tipped us off to something at jumbo privacy dot com. Jumbo wants to be your privacy assistant, and it is one app for all of your privacy needs. I have not tried this yet, but you can manage your privacy on like Facebook and Google and Twitter and and the Amazon a lady and they're adding things all the time and and it looks very interesting. So that you know, it's cool stuff found. That's why we put this stuff out there. So I'll put a link in the show notes to that, too. Pretty interesting, huh? It's good to it. It is good to to have an easy way to be reminded to go and check your privacy settings on all of these things just so that they are set the way you want them to be set. So there you go. Right. Yeah. No, I'm just looking over their page here. No, I get what they're trying to do here. I mean, every now and then Facebook will throw up a dialogue saying, hey, you should probably check your privacy. Yes. And despite their horrible reputation regarding privacy. Right. Right. I mean, they do have a pretty the last I looked a pretty detailed section on their site that lets you set all sorts of things. And most people never even go there, never even go there. I think this this aims to make it easier as as lawyer Jeff says, it'll help make sure you don't get caught. So and they say it will clean your digital life in seconds. So there you go. Yes, Gary. Yeah, exactly. All right. Listener Dan replies to our conversation about water sensors in the last episode in 758 and says, I was using plain old battery operated water sensors in certain locations in the house under the sinks near the washing machine, near the water heater. Says I always wanted a smart water sensor instead. One day I got my usual email from Monoprice advertising a smart water sensor from Stitch, which is their internal brand, I think, of these, you know, smart home things. And he says, I purchased three of them. And other than a couple of false alarms, they are working fine. They're battery operated. They connect to an iOS app and so far so good. He says, I would, of course, love to have sensors that could then turn off the main water valve, but our shutoff is actually outside the house. So I haven't found a solution for that. He says, as a result, when we go out of town, we manually close the shutoff valve. Same, Dan, that's a piece of advice I'll share. Like, you know, when we were in Chicago this weekend, I turn off my our water pump, we're on a well, but I would do it. You know, it doesn't matter what we turn off our water pump. And I shut the valve to and that way, at least we're not adding water to the system if a leak develops while we're not home for an extended period of time. So, yeah, that's great, though, those stitch things. That's great, Dan. Only hesitation and this could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you're doing in your place. But they specifically state no hub required. That's right. It connects to Wi-Fi. Right. So they have their own app and their own and that's cool. But the thing is this would not be the product if you want to do the smart home thing. Oh, and that I looked and it does not support any. It does not seem to support or at least Z-Wave or another protocol. I look through. Well, but but if it's a standalone solution, I mean, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but this would not be a product that you want to integrate with your smart home, because it's kind of a standalone thing, as far as I can tell. Right. Is it though? I mean, could does a lady know about this? Do they mention that? Right. I don't I don't know. I just want to you may be very correct about this. I just want to make it clear that just because it doesn't see any mention of Z-Wave or a lady. So but no, I mean, I mean, the price is, you know, 20, twenty six bucks for a water sensor. Yeah. That's all I'm saying is that if I if I, you know, now that I'm building my smart home, if I got a water sensor, I would probably want to get one that would integrate and trigger things. Like, actually, I was thinking of this during the that's my question. Doesn't the stitch stuff do that? I mean, these things are connecting to it connect. So here's the let me let's let's step away description of the product. Let's step away from stitch for a second here. And let's talk about like those lifex bulbs, right? Those lifex light bulbs do not connect to a hub because they're Wi-Fi. So they connect to your wireless network, just like your phone or your Mac or anything else, right? And then because they're connected to your wireless network, they don't need a hub, right? They they talk Wi-Fi and from there they can get to the Internet. So in theory and with lifex bulbs in practice, they can be part of your smart home system because you could you could program your smart things hub to talk to your lifex bulbs. You can program your home kit hub to talk to your lifex bulbs. You can program your a lady from Amazon, right? So these speak Wi-Fi just like my lifex bulbs do. The question is, right, I agree, but I see no reference again. Agreed. Yeah. A lady or Z-Wave or ZigBee, which is typically a sign of a smart home product. So again, I'm not saying it's a bad product. I'm just planting a seed for people that are trying to build their smart home network is that. Well, this this is a great standalone product. But and again, the little story I wanted to tell is that during the winter months, I actually wanted to find a something compatible humidity sensor because I have humidifiers, you know, we want to. I wanted to write a workflow saying, all right, if the humidity is below this, then turn on the humidifier because I actually do have a switch hooked up to a humidifier. And to me, I thought it'd just be cool saying, oh, well, you're below 20 percent. So or below whatever. So turn on. So the Stitch app does link with Alexa's Amazon's a lady or or Google's thing. So yeah, for sure. And it may well also have a way to link to like Homebridge or, you know, your smart things, Webcore or whatever. OK, yeah, I guess the monopriceless thing is just not. Oh, it says it on there on the like on this main stitch page. It talks about the Amazon, the Amazon stuff, so and the Google stuff. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's sort of the beauty of of these things is, you know, and that that's what we've been talking about is finding, you know, the the platform, the smart home platform, be that home kit or Amazon's a lady or Google assistant or smart things where all of you can talk to and hear from all of your devices so that even if they are different brands, they can all sort of link together and and and here you go. Yeah, that's yet another one. So yeah, I was pretty sure when we talked to them at PEPCOM that they had said that a lady was was involved. So no, no, no. OK, and Brian posted an article. OK. All right. So that product listing just wasn't very. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah. And oh, and yeah, you're right. Brian in the chat room says it supports if as well. So that's yet another platform that you can use to be your smart home kind of, you know, glue if you will. Yeah. All right. I still stand by my caution since that you should look for integrations beyond totally agree. Totally agree. Yeah. You don't want it to just be isolated to the vendor's app and nothing else. You know, you may have to use the vendor's app to configure it. In fact, you probably will and should. But once you're there, then, you know, linking it with whatever your chosen glue is. And I think that's the right way to think of it. Like home kits just glue. The lady is glue, you know, smart things is glue. It's just these things that that allow us to to see everything. Yeah, there you go. Maybe I'll get one now. They don't make it. It looks like they don't make a humidity sensor yet. Oh, there you go. All right, Robin, sort of along the same lines. Says I was sure that I had heard about the Princeton I O T inspector on your show, but cannot see it in the show notes anywhere. So maybe it was from another podcast. I think it was. He says, if you do not know about it as geeks, you will love it. It listens to all your I O T devices in your house and reports back to you on who they're talking to, how often they talk, et cetera. He says it was fun to, you know, take a look at all of these things. And it is it's from the folks at Princeton at Princeton University down there in New Jersey. It is a Mac OS tool that that is available. Windows and Linux aren't available yet. So these are Mac folks over there at Princeton building this thing. And and and you scan it and off you go. I will say that Robin does caution if you have a thing box or something else in your network that's watching for atypical traffic, for lack of a better term. It will light up like a Christmas tree when this thing runs, because, of course, it's sending atypical traffic to pull all of these devices. So just be aware of that. But but yeah, free and cool. I haven't run this yet. Did you check this one out yet, John? Believe it or not, yes, to a certain level. And the only caution I will have here is that it appears to want a browser that's not Safari. OK, OK, that makes sense, because Safari is very limited. Basically, they need. See, a Chromecast, I guess they're using Chromecast or something. OK, the thing is it will not run properly within Safari, but it will run properly within from what I could tell, Firefox and Chrome Chrome, I haven't actually done it yet. And yeah, so they mentioned something actually here to your point earlier. It conducts ARP spoofing on your network to intercept network traffic. So that's why it would set off some security devices, because that's usually viewed as something that's naughty. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And Safari is limited in what it will allow things to do from inside the browser. And if this tool is leveraging the browser, then it doesn't. It's not surprising at all that Safari would not allow this, would not, would not support this, I guess, is probably right. And the only thing I'm going to say here is that you may ask yourself, not only how do I work this, but you may ask yourself, how do I change my default web browser? Sure, because if you click on the link for this thing, it's going to launch your default browser. And if it's Safari, it's not going to work. Well, that sucks. So how do you fix that? You go to System Preferences General and you're going to see in the middle of that window there something that says default web browser. And you may want to change it to Chrome or Firefox if you want to run this tool. Huh, I also see some other things in here. I would have I would have sworn that that was you're right. That used to be in the Safari preferences, which is kind of dumb. It's like, well, why would you put the preference for the browser in the browser? Well, for mail, it's in mail. For calendars, it's in calendar. So, oh, all right. All right. So you're yeah, they're yeah, that that's inconsistent. It's inconsistent now. But it was it didn't used to be it used to be consistent. So yeah, but I had to do this exercise in order to at least run the UI for the tool. Then I'm at the point where it's like, OK, well, what devices do you want me to snoop on? Sure. And as mentioned, yeah, ARP spoofing is a is a fun way to monitor traffic. So I don't know if I want to know the truth, Dave. What are my IOT devices, which yeah, what are they saying? You know, do I care if people know that my lights are on or off or what the temperature is in my house or who's on like cameras? So here's here's the thing, right? If you are running. Any of the platforms that we've discussed aside from HomeKit. So we're talking smart things. We're talking Wink. We're talking, you know, Amazon's a lady, Google's lady. All of those are cloud managed, right? And the benefit of that is you can, of course, get to the cloud from anywhere. But but in theory, so could anyone else, right? If they have your credentials with HomeKit, it is your either your iPhone that's doing all the heavy lifting while you're while it is in the home on the local network. Or as we discussed in the last episode, you can have a HomeKit hub, which sort of happens automatically if you have an Apple TV or a home pod or and you can manually set up an iPad to be that HomeKit hub. So so there is like from that standpoint, that's part of the safety security that HomeKit brings to things is that it's not being run through Apple's cloud. But that, of course, comes with great limitations on the brands and types of devices that you can add to it. And then, like we've said, there's those home bridge things that, you know, home things like home bridge that help make HomeKit unofficially extensible and that sort of thing. But yeah, so all your devices and with like with any of these, you know, we talked about the the stitch thing, right, the water sensors. So those are going to talk to to monoprises cloud or stitches cloud, right? My life expulbs are going to talk to life exes cloud. My Phillips bulbs are going to talk to Phillips cloud. And all of those things then are pulled and or talk to if and Amazon and Google and smart things, right? So there's lots of traffic from inside your house, but also lots of traffic happening amongst all these different cloud things that you've given permission to talk with each other about what's going on in your home. So there's lots and lots and lots of stuff going on that you won't even see with this tool because it's all happening, you know, out there in the cloud. They're just talking about you, not to you. You know, if your water sensor senses water it sends that data to the monoprises cloud. Now, assuming that that is something that's exposed in their APIs to Amazon for the A lady, it could then send that signal from mono price to Amazon, right? So your house sends it to mono price, mono price sends it to Amazon. Amazon looks at its set of rules that you've set up for it and says, oh, I should turn that light on red and send a notification. So it says, cool, I'm going to send a notification through service A. I don't know, even know what service it might be. And then also, I'm going to now talk to your life ex bulb. So Amazon sends a signal to life ex and then that jumps back down to your bulb. So there's this huge conversation that happened in the cloud and only two things happen in your house, right? You get the the sensors sent a signal out and then magically a signal comes back in to to turn on your light bulb or, you know, something, whatever. So yeah, there's a lot going on out there, man. And I don't know that I want to know. I'm sorry to all of you that just heard this conversation if you didn't want to know. So there you go. But anyway. Right. Isn't that crazy? There are too many clouds. But I think it's too many clouds. It's true. All right, Tim, let's go to Tim here. We'll jump back two episodes to 757. Tim says he just finished listening to the discussion about car adapters, which inspired him to look into things further. He says he has a 2006 Beetle of VW at the time offered a 30 pin adapter to connect the iPod to the stereo. All right, makes sense. Says I have this installed and it resides in my glove box. Episode 757 got me wondering if anything anyone came out with a Bluetooth adapter that would plug into the 30 pin connector that lots of cars of this vintage have. Turns out someone did. And Dave, they're in your neck of the woods. The company is called Coolstream from Exeter, New Hampshire at Coolstreamrocks.com. They have two adapters, one for the car and the other for speakers like the Bose that had an iPod dock. Says I guess it would also work with the iPod Hi-Fi. Remember that? The car adapter is a little more expensive, but it actually can display track information on the car stereo. Yeah, because it's displaying it can get smart information over Bluetooth, translates it to 30 pin and you're good to go. That's actually pretty cool. Thank you for sharing that, Tim. I know there's somebody out there that's going to that's having an aha moment right now and and now he's spending their money with Coolstream, which is even better. So the link is in the show notes as always. Good. Yeah. Cool. John actually got one of the products that was recommended in our last episode, the the Rove thing. Yeah, if I'm transmitter Bluetooth thing. Yeah, it's so cool. It was only like 25 bucks. That's awesome. And it works, right? The yeah. So so basically if you got to find a dead radio station and FM, and then you set it and they have an app and the app is cool too. Basically, yeah, I was able to stream whatever was on my my phone to my car stereo. That was fun. That was not the only interesting. The actually the feature that I really like that wasn't really mentioned. They have a feature that monitors the battery in your car. Oh, so when you turn on so they only so they recommend you run it after when your car is running and charging and not when it's just sitting there. Sure. But it'll show you the voltage. And so with my car, it indicates between thirteen point seven and fourteen point four volts on the battery. And it considers that healthy. But that's kind of a neat feature. It's like, well, why not do that? That's pretty good. You know what the voltage is. Yeah. So this is the road smart charge car kit. Is that is that? Yes, F2. Yeah. OK, cool. I'll put the F2 has an app. And then I think they have an F zero that does not have an app. But the app is cool. That's cool. It was really neat because my last experience is I think you indicated is that some of these FM transmitters are. This one seems to be powerful enough, or I just found a dead spot there in the past. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. Is in in metro areas and, you know, in like highly populated areas, it's really hard to find an FM station that's dead. That's dead enough to to do this. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep. That's awesome, man. That's great. Cool. Yeah. So thank you. Listener who who told was listener Mark and listen to seven because I never would have found this on my own. I never thought I needed it. But I think now I do that. See, that's the thing. That's why cool stuff found. People say it's our most expensive segment to listen to because it's things you didn't know you needed. Didn't know existed. How could you know you needed it? So here's something that used to exist and no longer does. So I call this not cool stuff found, John. Oh, yeah. We used to for years. We have been happily running with S-MIME security certificates that we have been getting in recent years from Komodo. And and we've talked about it lots on the show and anybody that gets across the pond, I believe. OK. Are they? I think they're OK. Yeah, I don't know. And there are something like that, but they're they're based outside of the US. But, you know, they'll give you a cert to anybody or they used to. Well, they still will. But it used to be that the certs would last for a year. And now they last somewhere between 30 and 90 days for their free email certificates, which stinks because it really makes using an email cert almost useless if it won't persist for more than 30 days, because people need to have your cert to send you encrypted email. And if your search changing every 30 days, trying to keep on top of that's nearly impossible. So we'll still be using GPG with our Mackey Kebby email. And you can certainly encrypt to us that way. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes. But but if anybody finds relatively inexpensive email certs that last, you know, a year or whatever, please let us know feedback at Mackey Kebby.com. I'm not sure if I heard you right, Dave. I think you said feedback at Mackey Kebby.com. I did say feedback at Mackey Kebby.com. It's true. Yeah. So GPG suite is what is what it's called for PGP email. But so, you know, which I still use, I mean, and we have the thing is, it's a pain in the neck to use on iOS, right? Well, so is Esmime. Esmime is all but worthless on iOS anyway. Well, but if you if you do the silly walk, if you do. Yeah, exactly. Silly walk, you can get it to work on iOS. But sort of, you know, PGP is not native in any way, shape or. No, that's right. That's correct. Esmime is kind of as long as you don't screw up. Native ish. Yeah. Right. Who who who was it who wrote the article for us? Oh, it's Jeff Butts about Esmime, but it's it's worthless now because you're not going to like I wouldn't recommend going through any of that. It's too bad. Hey, you know, we were talking about Brian Christiansen's what route on a previous episode and I started looking at some other things that Brian Christiansen makes. And there are a few that seem very interesting to me. The one and I'll put a link to this. I believe all these things are free or donation where CPU setter is a little app that that can be used to adjust the number of active cores on your CPU and it can disable or enable hyper threading on supported CPUs. And so he he he has a little frequently asked questions. And one of the questions is why would you ever want to do this? And the first answer is because you can. But and he says some software is based on, you know, license based on the number of CPUs. So limiting that, obviously, you know, can help you run software that might have been licensed for an older Mac, but isn't, you know, capable on your newer Mac with more cores. Disable hyper threading would have helped with those specter meltdown exploits back when those were happening. But you can also use it to limit the number of CPUs for a specific process. So if you want to give handbrake just one CPU from, you know, the four of them or whatever, you can do things like that. So anyway, he's got he's got some cool stuff there. He's got Phantasmic for controlling the fans, File Watcher, System Name. So you got to go check this out. Anyway, we'll put a link to it. But that's it's the epitome of cool stuff found. It's the treasure trove, if you will. Yeah, I could see. No, I like the because you can. But right, especially the thing is. Running a core takes power. Power generates heat and true power reduces your battery life. So if you can get what you need done with less cores, I'm with it. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. And it's nice. I mean, this guy is like a guru because, I mean, you know, I pretty much suspected there was a command where you could tell the CPU. Yeah, shut these off. OK. Yeah, right. Right. Wow, he really he really got down and dirty there. Look at that. He did. I know. It's awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. All right. We've got a few more here and the cool stuff found list from listener Peter, who I know I had it up. Oh, no, maybe it's not in the email. Oh, yeah, Peter. Oh, it was it was Peter Cohen. On Facebook, I saw him posting about this thing called the human centric Mac mini mount, which attaches to the back of your monitor where the visa mounts would go. So if you were going to buy like a visa mount to put your monitor on the wall, that your monitor likely has mounts for that. It's a it's a standard VESA and that way you can, you know, buy your mount and attach your monitor to it or a desk clamp or whatever you want. Well, for 15 bucks, human centric makes a Mac mini holder that you attach to the visa mount points on your monitor. And now your Mac mini is up off your desk. It's kind of like having an iMac because, you know, it's all like. So a visa mount, if I recall, I think I've looked at this. So it's it's four screw holes in standard in a standard configuration. Right. I don't know if it's just four, but yes, that it is. It is a series of it's a number, but they're in a standard place, which you then attach to a bracket and the bracket attaches to whatever else. Right. I like this. So the Mac mini is piggybacking. Correct. Or within the mount. I like that. Wow, that's a really clever I know limitation. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's I like it. It's good. It's like building your own Mac mini. It's just. Yep. Instead of it being in the in the monitor, it's. Clamp to them. Right. It's clamp to the monitor. Right. Yeah, exactly. It's it's just, you know, it's like open sourcing your own iMac because you get to have a Mac mini. I mean, it's not quite open source, but you get my idea. You pick your monitor, you pick your Mac mini and you marry the two together. So yeah, it's pretty good. Hey, all right. So Scott has a good one here for us. Scott says, Gents, I have found dark mode to be helpful because it became so annoying to have to manually make the change. Although I've programmed an Apple script to do and assigned it a simple keystroke. He says, I like this stuff to happen automatically. And he says with night shift already making a determination as to when to change the backlighting and colors on my Mac screen. I figured there had to be a way to sync that with dark mode. There is. It's simple to do, but may intimidate people because it's found on GitHub requires a download and running some weird thing called a bash script, which is just a terminal script. Says us geeks may know what this is all about, of course, but most folks don't. And he says you download the thing from GitHub. We'll put a link to this in the show notes, store the file in a folder that contains your other scripts and and then you run this this thing. And we'll link to the instructions and all that. And what happens is night shift will then sync and turn on dark mode automatically for you so that you can you can just have dark mode at night and not dark mode during the day, which is pretty good. And I and like I said, I'll put a link to all that. But if you don't want to go through this, there's an app called Night Owl at night owl crames or that X Y Z. And we will put a link to that in the show notes. And it does the same thing or something very, very similar where you can have it, you know, schedule your your dark mode with sunrise and sunset or at certain times of day. And you can actually exclude certain apps from being put into dark mode. So if you have one app like me, busy Cal, for whatever reason, I do not like busy Cal in dark mode. But some other apps I really like in dark mode. And so I was like, OK, great, like no problem, just exclude that one. You're good to go. So, yeah, I will, again, we'll put links to all these things in the in the show notes. But yeah, Night Owl, pretty cool. Good, right? Yeah. No, I'm not that dark. That's not that dark. I prefer the light to the dark, you know, I know. Actually, you know what? I'm my laptop light. Yeah. Well, no, I don't the only thing I do is what you mentioned, which is I put my screensaver, you know, what has the the night desert thing. But other than that, I dark mode was just nothing that was really important to me. Like, yeah, OK, I see how some people could find this useful. But no, I find it helpful. I don't like it on my desktop, but on my laptop, I use it quite a bit. Yeah, yeah. But again, you know, there's that one app, busy Cal, that I just don't like the way it adapts to dark mode and so I can use Night Owl to skip that one. Well, I guess every vendor has to figure the palette they want to use. Right? That's that's sort of they should. They don't have to. If you're using some default pallets, you will inherit, you know, Apple's changes to those when you when dark mode is flipped. But yes, the app developers should do that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So so the way it is now, do you so apps that understand dark mode, do they just have two choices in there? Yeah, you have two different pallets. That's exactly right. Dark, but there's no nuances to it. Is that all controlled by Apple, then or what do you mean? There's no nuances in it. If you go into dark mode, yeah, the colors that are are the whatever they do to the image compared to the the day mode. Is that dictated by Apple or is that dictated by the developer and it's just the developer? I think it's at least in one of your cases made a choice that you weren't pleased with. Right. In this scenario, I think it's the developer's choices for it. And it's probably also has something to do with the colors that I've assigned to my various calendars, too. Right? Like, you know, and so it's just it just looks weird. But to answer your question, I think the answer is yes, in that both the developer and Apple have jobs to do. For example, if like a true image is going to be displayed, that image will never change with dark mode. It's just a picture, right? But if that image is part of your user interface elements, then as the developer, you need to have two versions of the image, one for when it's in dark mode and one for when it's in light mode. So, yeah. Right. Yeah. Hey, I've always been a fan of specs, folio cases and with the new 11 inch iPad. I am still that is still very much true. Their Presidio portfolio 11 inch iPad Pro case for that 11 inch iPad is awesome. It's it's got a pocket in it, like a tiny little pockets, maybe the wrong word. But it's got a home for your Apple pencil that sits inside the case, still magnetically connected to your iPad so that the pencil will charge, but it's fully protected and fully covered when the folio is closed. So it makes it really easy to have your pencil with you all the time. It's not kind of hanging off the edge of your iPad in a way that it's it's going to fall off or get knocked off. You put it, you know, you put the pencil in the case. It's magnetically adhered, you know, to your iPad. You close the case and it's all very safely kind of tucked in there. So you got to check this out if you've got one of those. Those new iPads go go check that out because it's good stuff. All right, that's the end of cool stuff found. We made it, John, I think. Can I can I take a minute and and and thank all of I want to thank everybody for making it through cool stuff found with us. And now I want to thank all of our premium supporters whose whose contributions came in this week, if that's OK. Yeah. So Stylianos from Tennessee sent a one time contribution of 50 bucks in. Thanks, Stylianos. On the monthly ten dollar plan, we had contributions come in from Michael from Iowa, Dave from Illinois, Clive from West Sussex, Jim from San Jose, Jeff from Indiana, Joseph from Georgia, Scott from California, Charles from Cuyocho. Cuyocho, I think I don't know. I don't know if I'm correct. Robert from Alabama, Tony from San Francisco, Gary from New York, Bobby from North Carolina and Ev the nerd the biannual $25 every six months plan. Deborah from New Hampshire, Lyndon from Kent, Mike from North Carolina, Robert from Minnesota, Thomas from Chicago, Kenneth from New York, Keith from Essex, Chuck from Pennsylvania, Mark from Indiana and Steve from West Lothian. Thank you to all of you, you rock and you know it. And if you're interested in supporting the show directly, you certainly can. And that's all available to you at MackieCab.com slash premium. We very, very much appreciate it, of course. And as a thank you, you get access to our premium at MackieCab.com email address. So please don't forget that. Of course, if you do and you send us email to the other email address, you know, and we realize it will will reply from the premium one so that you you get put in that priority queue. But but yes, thank you to all of you. It really does make a huge difference. And we appreciate it. All right. Where are we here? We're at the old one oh two mark, huh? There are ways to go. We've got a way. We've got a yes. Well, the SST talk. Yeah. Yeah, let's go to Ken here here. Yeah, I agree. Ken Ken asks, he says, do you know the best internal SSDs between three and four terabytes? So that's a that's a small group of options you have there. But you know, we can kind of talk in general about SSDs and which ones we'd buy. And then and then we can talk about which ones are a little bigger than that. So as I as I understand it, Western Digitals only go up to two terabytes, which is three oh nine for the two terabyte SSD. Seagate's Barracuda goes up to two terabytes. But then Seagate's Iron Wolf SSDs will go to three point eight terabytes. I don't see them for sale yet, but I've had the opportunity to test a slightly smaller one. And they're I mean, they're you know, they're those crazy drives, right? The Iron Wolfs are nuts because they have all the extra smarts that they can safety safety and integrity protection and all that. So yeah, they put an extra layer of. Yep, goodness. That's true. And then Seagate's Nitro SSD goes up to three point eight four terabytes. And that's available for seven fifty six. And Ken, who asked the question, had a an SSD that failed or some drive that failed and Amazon gave him a seven hundred sixty five dollar credit for this. So that fits the budget right there, except that Samsung's four terabyte eight sixty Evo drive is only six sixty one, or at least it was when I pulled up prices here a few days ago. So that's another one to look at. And honestly, all of the brands we mentioned, Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, those are, you know, reliable, good SSD brands. Kingston is another one that I've used and had good luck with. So I would I would recommend any of those four. Are there any SSD brands that you've used that you'd rely on that we haven't yet mentioned, John? I will mention the two that I currently have and one that I'm struggling with with the firmware update, but that'll be another story for another time. But OK, she'll. Oh, of course. So yeah. Well, the thing is, so a couple of years ago, both in my Mac Mini and my Mac Mac Pro, I have a one terabyte crucial M five hundred SSD. Yeah, you can see they I believe they go up to two terabytes right now. I have the one terabyte. I've been very happy with this drive. You know, it's exceeded my expectations that it's fast, you know. Check the speeds. The other one, Dave, that I got for a backup drive because they had a deal online, and although I have the one terabyte, but now they have a two terabyte is the SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD. I can't I forget, but the thing is the price for it. Dude, it's like it's like 100. I think I got it for like one hundred something dollars, which for one terabyte SSD, which I'm using for backup now. So on both my machines, I have crucial one terabyte SSDs. And for both machines, I use the SanDisk one terabyte as a backup using carbon copy cloner. So and again, they work as expected. So I would I would recommend both of those brands as well. I would. Yeah, I would. It's interesting that you but it's interesting the question because it seems to be that there is a line between two terabytes and then greater than two terabytes is that some vendors just don't bother with anything greater than two. And I'm kind of scratching my head as to why not? It's probably a chip density thing, right? Like it's like as crucial as two terabyte is available for 250 bucks, right, which is great. And then, you know, the best four terabyte that we're finding is you know, 661, which is quite a bit more than double that in price wise. And yeah, the economy of scale has not quite kicked in there. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I guess there's not the demand for that much capacity in a single SSD, so that's why the price is relatively higher. It's like it's almost like you could build your own, right? Yeah, you right. You could you could raid them together in a in a what raid zero, right? Which would just like. Yeah, or JBOD or JBOD, right? Yeah, it's just all together. And it's like, hey, you just save some money and that you, you know. Yeah, it's true. It's true. All right. Well, while we're on the subject of SSDs, Andrew has a question and he says I read an article about SSDs, garbage collection and trim that they say that there is a security hole with OS with Mac OS 10 Yosemite when enabling trim. But do you know if this is an issue with newer versions of Mac OS? And I wonder if trim is really worth enabling when replacing drives in Macs today, I think this is an important topic to keep learning about. So, you know, that bug in Yosemite was because the trim enabler that ran in Yosemite was a third party trim enabler and it ran with an unsigned kernel extension. So it wasn't that there was a security hole. It was that you needed to turn off kext security or kernel extension security in order for that particular extension to load. It really wasn't a big deal. But the other good news is it's not necessary anymore because there is a a terminal command now built in to Mac OS since Yosemite that you can run. And I'm pretty sure it's called. Oh, now why can't I remember it? Do you remember it off the top of your head? It's not trim enable, is it? Oh, you know, enable trim. I think it was enabled trim. Is that right? Yeah. Well, hold on. Trim force, right? Isn't it trim force? It is. It's trim force. Yeah. So you say, yes, I got a man page on it. Yeah. Yeah. You issue. I think you have to do it as a sudo command. So you do SUDO space trim force, all one word space enable. And then that will turn on trim for your third party SSD. You're essentially forcing trim to be on for a non Apple drive because Apple won't turn it on. Right. And the command. Yes. So if you do man on trim force, it says enable trim commands on third party drives, which. So as yeah, my colleague just said, Apple SSDs have this turned up by default. And I guess most on Apple don't. Which yeah, Apple just doesn't trust. They don't implicitly trust that a third party is going to handle these garbage collection routines in the expected way. The reality is 100 percent of the drives that we've ever seen do much standardized. It is. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, if they say and pick up your garbage, right? Yeah, well, it tells your trash. It tells the driver, please. Well, it tells it allows the OS and the drive to coordinate when things are actually free, which is which can be helpful as a drive gets more and more full. So yeah, there you go. Right. So if you don't have it enabled, I guess a kind of dangerous question, you may see degraded right performance. Yeah. Yeah, you might have term enabled. Yep. I'll buy that. Yeah. But it says these are still way faster than rotational. You want to take us through Ed relatively quickly here? Yeah, I think we can. So it was an interesting question here. So it says I have a 2017, 27 inch iMac and I'm running the latest Mojave OS. I use MDRP, which I believe is Mac DVD Ripper Pro. I'll buy that. Yep. For a dollar. I think it costs a little more than a buck. But there you go. We'll put a link in the show notes. You know where that quote came from. I do. Sure, you do. Or if you don't, we'll tell people. But he uses MDRP to rip my purchase DVDs. And every time I launch the app, I get this notice. I check the system report and also check with the developer to confirm that it is indeed a 64 bit app. What's the notice? Wait, what's the notice? What's the notice? Well, I'm getting there. Also, the notice is he sent a picture of a dialogue and it says and many of you may have seen this as of late. And especially if we're running the latest Mac OS, but he got the notice saying MDRP dot app is not optimized for your Mac and needs to be updated. This software will not work with future versions of Mac OS and needs the updated to improve compatibility, blah, blah, blah. What this is basically saying is. I think the app you're running is a 32 bit app. Now, what is 32 bit versus 64 bit? The thing is, there are so many dimensions to this, but let's just. It could talk about the amount of memory you can address. I can talk about the architecture of the executable. But let's just say that it's talking about. The thing is, you want your apps to be running 64 bit code and that all the things that they do internally are represented in a piece of data that is 64 bits in length versus 32 bits in length. I hope I'm not oversimplifying that. No, I think that's good. And whether it's the amount of memory you can address or the processor commands. And that's the two classes of things being a computer type of guy that I think that's classified as. The thing is 32 bit is old news and it should be gotten rid of because it just. Yeah, imposes limitations as far as either the amount of memory or the power of the instructions that you're using on your processor to use. So as of late, Mac OS will come up and if it sees an app that it thinks is 32 bit. It'll warn you and will give you this warning. The thing is, I downloaded this app and I looked at it. And it's 64 bits. So the only thing I can think of that is causing this problem Dave is that there is a little database hidden in the. Hidden within Mac OS called launch services. And it contains all sorts of juicy data about the apps before they launch. I think this is also the one that warns you. Oh, you just downloaded this app from the internet. Do you want to, you know, open it? Are you sure about this? I think that's the same database. So it's a database of things having to do with when you're launching apps. And one of those things, Dave, so I found a developer, an article at developer.apple.com that talks about launch services. And although it doesn't explicitly say the bittiness of the app is one thing that it warns about, I think that that database is corrupt. How do you fix that? You get Onyx. Onyx has a maintenance section and one of the maintenance sections is, hey, let's rebuild the launch services database. So we haven't heard back from... Ed. So, but that's the only thing in my head that would cause this. Yeah. It's definitely a 64-bit app because I downloaded the demo and it's like, yeah, it's 64. How do I know it's 64-bit? I went into Activity Monitor or you can also go into System Info and list all your apps and it'll show you the bittiness of them. So either of those methods are good. I have another method that Brian Monroe shared with us actually last week or two weeks ago in our post show in the chat room, which happens while we're sort of crunching the show and preparing it for release and all of that. And we were talking about this question and he pointed us to a page at eclecticlight.co which is home to several tools we've discussed and there is another tool that, I can't remember his name over there, makes at eclecticlight and that is architect, A-R-C-H-I-C-E-C-T which will tell you if an app has 32-bit components in it that are needed or optional. It gives you all kinds of information and of course it's free. So we'll, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good. Okay, as in architecture. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Awesome processor nerds use that word. Right, right. Howard, I believe. Howard Oakley is the name that wants to come to mind for eclecticlight. He's a prolific dude. So, yeah, it's good. Cool, awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's gonna become more and more important. I've had a few, you know, the one I had, Dave was, and I finally migrated, basically this is a hint that you should move away from whatever app it's identifying or yell out the developer. If it's right. If it's, I mean, like in Ed's case, it's erroneous, but... Yeah, it's incorrect, but... And this, I think I'd be curious if Ed ran architect on this and to see if it, what it said, because in theory, architect is not trusting the system. It's looking at the app binary itself and saying, here's what I found inside this thing. Right. So that's... Whereas I think the Mac OS thing is looking at the database. Right, right. It's just looking at the database. Yeah, exactly. Right, yeah, exactly. All right, one last one that I'll throw out here as a geek challenge before we move on for the next week. And it comes from listener Scott, who says, I remember from the past that you said you were a user of Keyboard Maestro and I have a question. Since Apple does not have mail merge in pages slash numbers anymore, I need something that could take a list of email addresses, an associated invoice file and send the invoice to each address with a canned message. I tried to write something using Automator and Applescript but cannot get them to do this without too much pain. And considering the last Small Business Show episode, which is another podcast I do at businessshow.co. So if you're a small business owner, go check it out, shameless plug, where he says we talked about whether it's worth spending our time on $10 an hour problems or $1,000 an hour problems, says it's somewhere in between but my time is more important. If something like Keyboard Maestro could do this for 36 bucks and a little of my time, i.e. far less programming, far less than programming it myself, easy for me to say, then I'm a buyer. Oh, sages of Mac geeked him, what say ye? So I don't think I'd use Keyboard Maestro for this. There might be a way to script it all but I think you'd be square peg around holding that scenario and I think it might be more frustrating than it should be. I could be wrong. So that's, as I said, this is a geek challenge. I have some ideas though. Mailchimp might be your easiest option using a third party service. Might well be the way to do that. We've used Mailchimp for many things here at Mac Geek and we're gonna start using it for more but it's a great service and really easy to use. Again though, you wanna do a little more customization because of your invoices and all that. So it might not be the right answer for this. FileMaker almost certainly would work and frankly is exactly how I would do it but I live in FileMaker every day so there's no cost to me to getting FileMaker. I already have it but FileMaker would make this super easy and would also sort of refute the Apple doesn't have a solution for this box because technically FileMaker is an Apple product. You know, honestly I gotta say that thinking of a database as a way to solve this problem versus a word processor. Yeah. I'm gonna differ with you. Okay. I would not as a newcomer to the computing realm think of a database as a way to solve a mail merge. I would agree with that. Yeah, we're not in disagreement on that. I would just do it with FileMaker. I totally agree with you that a database, if you grok databases, the only reason I say that is most people can navigate a word processor without. Totally agreed. Without having to learn anything new unless you get to the point of having to do a mail merge in which case then yes, you may have to learn how to make a template and stuff like that. But no, I mean, you're absolutely right. A database is the, because I mean, duh, where's the data? It's in the database. All the data for the people you wanna get in touch with is in your database. So why not use a database for it? It's then. Well, and the cool part about FileMaker is it's very easy to develop visually. So if he wants to have his invoices auto-generated from FileMaker and then emailed through FileMaker's mail merge, it's all there. You can do 100% of it, but. Now let me ask you this. Yeah. Small business show type of guy, what do you use to generate your invoices data? FileMaker. You do, okay. I do. We've been using FileMaker for 20 years though. Here at Mac Observer and Backbeat Media and all of that. I mean, yeah, it's part of our core DNA here. So again, that's why I say I would do this in FileMaker, but like I already do everything in FileMaker. So of course I would. I also though, back to your argument that this is better in a word processor. It's just not better in Apple's word processor because Apple's word processor doesn't seem to have this functionality. I would use LibreOffice, which does have this functionality. Mail merge is built right in. This word has this. So I think what you're saying is that word compatible platforms should have a mail merge function. Correct. Wait, so Apple actually, but I thought our friend Bob actually wrote us about this. Did they remove mail merge from pages? I think they did, yeah. I think so, yeah. Which is a shame, but you know, it's how it goes. Maybe most people weren't using it, you know, so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because me, I think about it more as a, well, no, I guess I'm leaning towards you. Now, I guess I'm not. The thing is, if I was sending out an invoice, I would be concerned about the look and feel of it. Not necessarily the data though, of course I want the data to be correct. Yeah, you want them both, right? So that's why I think of a word processor because I don't think of a database like FileMaker, though I'm sure you figured a way to do this is that a database is not necessarily the best tool to design a layout. Except FileMaker is. FileMaker is the best database to do, yeah. It has a facility to allow you to make a nice looking invoice. It totally does. It's easier than doing it a word processor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I would, like a word processor is probably the right thing for most people. So LibreOffice is free and has a mail merge wizard. And then of course, Microsoft Office for Mac is available for give or take 10 bucks a month and also has a mail merge wizard. So, but yeah, FileMaker for layouts, that's the beauty of FileMaker is it's actually quite powerful under the hood, but the thing it is most is that it is a visual layout tool to let you choose how you want to see your data. It's got scripting and all that behind the scenes and of course you can dig right in and do all that. But when you start with FileMaker, you're dragging things, you're creating a visual layout that you are gonna work inside and dropping fields in where you want them and all that stuff. It's yeah, it's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, but if you folks have anything to share, please share because that's what we do here. 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Dave, you're gone and you're back. I'm back. I don't know, but I think you have some advice to offer us now that you have went through the ringer. I am someone that I am a get to the airport early kind of person for whatever reason on our trip down to Boston to fly out to Chicago. And then this morning on our trip from the hotel we hit more traffic than we planned. We had exactly the right amount of time to get from wherever we started either home or the hotel to the airport and have maybe five minutes before the plane started boarding. And I will tell you traveling as with everything in life there's one overriding lesson that I would like that I've learned. I'm still trying to perfect it. Of course, I don't get this right all the time. In fact, I fail this test all the time, but it is the goal, the systems that we put in place are engineered such that we don't get caught. May the.