 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 650 for Sunday, March 26, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your questions, tips, and your cool stuff found. We share it all. The goal, of course, is for all of us to learn at least four new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode actually are you. We're going to talk more about Mac Geekab Premium this week. I actually had the backbeat guys leave the sponsor slots for this show blank for today so that we could have a little chat about our Mac Geekab Premium stuff and about sponsorship in general. It's all going fine. This was an intentional thing. But we'll talk more about that in a minute. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, 650 halfway to 1300. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Brown. Halfway to 1300. I don't know what that means. I don't know why I keep saying that, but but I've said it. So there you go. Yeah. How are you doing? You know. Yeah. All right. So since you had a loss for words, I will talk about how I am going to be spouting many, many, many words in various places over the next couple of weeks. So this coming Wednesday, March 29th, I will be talking Wi-Fi and routers and mesh at the Connecticut Mac Connection users group in Farmington, Connecticut. That's Wednesday evening. Then a week from Wednesday, April 5th, I will be speaking in Boston at the Mac Tech Pro conference all about loving the terminal or loving the console, I guess I should I should say that the console can be your friend. So that's it. Mac Tech Pro in Boston. That's a daytime event and it is a four-pay event. I believe Connecticut Mac Connection is open to the public and and I believe is free, but if you join, there's all sorts of benefits. So so there's that then. That's Wednesday the 5th, Thursday the 6th. I am going to be doing a lot of speaking, but not necessarily for a large audience all at once in that I'm going to PEPCOM with you, John, in New York City, the PEPCOM Digital Focus Springfest, where we'll be talking with lots of vendors, learning about stuff that we can, of course, come here and tell you folks about. And I mentioned that only because it's my my trip down the the northeastern seacoast or the northeastern coast, I should say, the northeastern quadrant of the United States, because on the morning of Saturday, April 8th, I will be speaking again about Wi-Fi and mesh at ML mug, which is the in Westchester, Pennsylvania, I think just outside of Philadelphia. And so I'm speaking there. I think that's 10 a.m. on that Saturday morning, April 8th. If you're in that area, I'd love to see you. So now I've done my I've told you all, I'm so bad about talking about these kinds of things on the podcast. I usually mention them in retrospecting people like, dude, you should have said something. Well, you're right. And now I have. So Wednesday, March 29th and and Saturday, April 8th, Wednesday, March 29th evening, Farmington, Connecticut, Saturday, April 8th morning in Westchester, Pennsylvania, speaking about Wi-Fi and mesh. And then Wednesday, April 5th at Mac Tech, from Boston. OK, so there you go. There you go. Now I've said it, John. You did indeed. Are we we're still are we still a loss for words? Oh, I'm I'm just going to be talking to myself for the most part. Cool. I think John's joining. I think you're going to be at the meeting for the 29th on the 29th. Yeah, that's good. So we're going to see each other two weeks in a row. Yeah, it's in the it's in the same state. It's kind of a haul for me, but yeah, it's almost. I mean, it's closer to you than it is to me, but it's definitely between us. Yeah. Well, I remember actually, did did you go but we went the I think that was the first Apple store they opened in Connecticut is in Farmington. So I remember going up there for that. I remember. Yeah, I do. It was somewhere in that in that neighborhood. Maybe it was Farmington. Yeah, it could be together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right at the mall there. Yeah. All right, we got some cool stuff found. Let's let's see if we can kick this thing off here. So Jamie writes, I was listening to episode 648 and was surprised not to hear about Song Sergeant during your segment on iTunes organization apps. Song Sergeant has been my go to app for fixing my iTunes library for years. It finds duplicates, naming inconsistent inconsistencies between tracks, orphaned files and missing songs. The main reason it's my go to is simple. When duplicates are found, album art and tags as well as iTunes specific metadata can be merged, including things like last played, date added, play counts and stars. Better yet, when merging in quotes, you can select which file will be kept based on multiple criteria like bit rate sample frequency file type. Merging all duplicates in your entire catalog can be done in as little as two clicks, but track by track is also right there in front of you. It works from 10.7 up through Sierra is kept up to date and is well worth the 20 bucks. Thank you, Jamie. That's I honestly, I don't know that I had ever heard of Song Sergeant. It doesn't doesn't register for me. So this is a new one for me. So there you go, chalking it up. That's one new thing I learned. That's it. Any thoughts on that, John, before we move on to to the next one here? Oh, who are? Oh, look at that. I know, we have some other things, too. Yeah, they write. Yeah, they make. In fact, he even says if they'd only merge it with their other app, MP Freaker, I'd be a happy man. And I can't remember what MP Freaker does, but it looks to do something interesting. So yeah. All right. Moving on in our cool stuff found segment here to listener. Mike, he says in show six forty nine, you discussed the services menu. And then actually, I pointed Jeff Butts to that and he wrote a great article on TMO about how to manage your services menu. So we'll put a link to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love having tip writers, more and more tip writers at TMO. It makes me like super happy. You've got him and Andrew and you've been writing some tip. Oh, it's killer, really killer. Anyway, I guess I'm hyper this morning. Mike says one of the things that I install on every new Mac is word service, a package of services for manipulating text. It can do some geeky things like changing line endings, decoding tabs, doing rotate 13 on your text, as well as standard text manipulation, such as all caps, initial caps, insert dates, insert times, all that stuff. My favorite features are sort lines, ascending and sort lines, descending. And you can get word service for free either from the Mac App Store or you can download it from Devon's web page. It's from Devon Technologies. Both methods, as I said, and as he says, are free. So I installed this. This is a this is a cool one. I I like it. I think it's pretty good. I'm loving the services menu. I, you know, after our show last week or two weeks ago, I went through and like cleaned up my services menu. So it actually has only the things that I want. And and, of course, that's, you know, that's what that's what Jeff Butts posted about for us. But and so we'll put that in the show notes, too. Yeah, I know. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. All right. Moving right along, unless there's a unless there's something you'd like to to go through there, John. No, go, go. OK, moving right along. We are going to David, who says. Not sure if you guys reviewed this, but one thing I do like about running on Windows is the snap to sides for app windows. And there is an app called Magnet that has that capability and more. And indeed, it's ninety nine cents in the Mac App Store. And this is an interesting app. I am I I I have weird feelings about this app. So it takes a little getting used to. But what Magnet does is it's one of these, as David says, it's a window manager for the Mac in terms of very quickly putting things in a in an organized way. So you grab a window and then depending on where you put it, it will appear. It will it will change the size and layout of that particular window, but only temporarily. So what's cool is you if you grab a window and you move it to the corner and essentially you're not moving the window, you're moving your mouse pointer. So grab the window and then it's done. It's based on where your mouse pointer goes. And this this took me a little while to figure out. But if you drag your mouse pointer while you're dragging the window to the corner of the screen, any corner, it will make that window quarter size of your screen. If you drag it just to the side of the screen, it does it to half the screen. If you want to maximize, you drag it to the top edge. And then if you drag it to the bottom, it cuts it into thirds, you know, vertical thirds of the screen. You can do, you know, left, middle or right. And this is very cool. The coolest part is as soon as you drag the window away from there after you've done some work, it restores to its previous size. So it's not like you're screwing up whatever else you've got going on. It's just like, like when I prep this show, I get to a point after we've pulled in all your stuff. We do this all in Google Docs. So I have a couple of windows open with Google Docs. And once we finish, like once I finish prepping the agenda, then I have to copy things over to the timestamps. And then I have to manage the Evernote group to make sure it has all the right things in it. And so at that point, I was able to put these things in in like I did half screens for like the timestamps document as well as the agenda document. And now I was able to just move things back and forth really quickly. And then when I was done, I just dragged it out of that. And boom, my windows went back to the size I want. The same with Evernote. I needed to arrange things so we had stuff in the right spot in Evernote, because that's what John and I use. And so I just did the half screen with that and I could see the agenda on one side and Evernote on the other. And I did it real quickly. And then I dragged it out from that and boom, it went back to the size that I normally run Evernote at. So it's a pretty cool app. But it took a little bit of getting used to. So, so there you go. That's that's my thing, John. Have you tried this yet? I'm looking at it. No, I haven't. But I'm. And yeah, somebody in our chat room here, how do you get to our chat room? That's at macgeekapp.com slash stream. But someone asked, what's the feature Mac OS that puts two windows side by side? Oh, that's split screen. That that's yeah, yeah, yeah. So and you can do that. My son does it all the time and I forget how to do it. Oh, you what you do is you put one of them into a full screen mode. So now it's in its own space, right? And then you go and you grab another window and click and drag the like click and hold on the on the green in the upper left. There's the red, yellow and green and the green is the maximized one. If you click and hold on that, actually you do that with the first one, click and hold on it and then you can pick which half of the screen that goes to. And I'm about to screw myself up here because I think I just did half screen. Yeah, so you just so forget what I said. Start by clicking and holding on the green button and it will you can pick which half of the screen. And then once you do that on the other half, you see all your other windows and you pick the one you want and boom, up comes the, now you've got windows in split screen. So there you go. Okay, yeah. And something to add to that that I invoke, I think I invoked once by accident and I'm like, how did I do that? But there's also a feature in the OS that we haven't talked about in a while called mission control that gives you various ways to manipulate what you see on your desktop and to see your widgets and all that fun stuff. I think the thing that I do mostly is it's either control up arrow or I think a triple finger up is it'll all of a sudden show you all of your windows. They're, you know, they're smaller but it gives you a sense of what a mess your desktop may be. And sometimes I'll invoke it just to be like, well, I got too many windows. Yeah, or where is that window? That's right, yeah. Yeah, right. And that combines also with spaces which I don't really, I don't really use but some people do. Well, and that's what this does is the split screen is inside of spaces is where that really goes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty good. All right, so split screen inside of spaces because Alex found the, Alex found the knowledge base article. So we'll put that right in our beautiful little show notes here that we lovingly handcraft. Okay. Lawyer Jeff told me a couple of weeks ago about something that I will certainly call cool stuff found his son, his two year old son came into his office and drew a pretty picture for him on his 28 inch mono price screen with a blue Sharpie. Yep. He drew daddy a picture. You should be allowed to draw on the screen, right? Yeah. Don't stifle his creativity. That's what his son thought. That's right. I hope it wasn't a permanent. Thankfully. Oh, this was a Sharpie dude. This is as permanent as it gets. So thankfully, lawyer Jeff realized this right away and used something he keeps around the house called spray away glass cleaner. So that plus a little elbow grease did it. I had never heard of spray away glass cleaner but evidently it's fairly common around the house in Texas even though I lived in Texas for six years. I didn't grow up there, right? And I only had kids in Texas for a brief period of time. So and now having, you know, being well along the path of raising two kids, there are lots of things you learn about cleaning a home that only start after you have kids in the house. But yeah, spray away, not spray away, spray way. Sorry, I misspoke and it's spray way and you can buy it on Amazon for seven bucks. So there you go. I will, I'll put a link to that in the show notes because I think we all might need that from time to time. So is there, so I guess there must be some non-destructive solvent of some sort. It's ammonia free. My guess is there's something in it that's destructive because it obviously took the, you know, the permanent marker off the screen. So it might be doing something awful to your anti-glare coating if you were to use it. And that was the point I wanted to bring up. There's a lot of cleaners, especially if you have a matte screen. Yeah, pretty much anything other than water is going to do something bad to your screen. I think, I mean, look, that's the point, right? It's there to take something off. So yeah. But yeah, this is ammonia free. So at least it has that. So thank you for the recommendation there. And then and then lastly, John, I have a cool stuff found of my own to talk about something that actually I ran into it at CES called Lima at meatlima.com. Lima is something that will it's a purpose built, singular purpose, private cloud solution. So it's they've got two of them. There's the Lima and then the Lima Ulta, I think. And and let me make sure I get this right. I'm looking at them both. So yeah, there's the the ultra, sorry. But it's personal cloud. What what that means is this is a device that has three ports on it. One is power. So of course, it's powered. The other the second is ethernet plugs into your router or somewhere in your network. But your router is as good a place as any. And then the third port is USB and you plug that into your hard drive, a USB hard drive. And then from there, it you go and you configure it, you download software onto your Mac and it's kind of like Dropbox for your Mac and iOS devices and your Windows device. But you host the content. So private cloud and it works. I have to say I was very impressed. The app feels like the whole installation process feels very Mac like the iOS app works well. There's a couple of things that are sort of interesting about it. It mounts as a drive on your Mac. So when you get this thing and it's not connected to your Mac, right? It's it's only connected on the network. But it shows up as a drive, unlike where Dropbox is just a folder or, you know, Synology's cloud station is just a folder. This is it mounts itself as a drive. But if you go to slash volumes slash Lima, it's not there. There's nothing there where it lives is in home library Lima. So I mean, it's fine. It's just a little different than what you would experience. But it works totally fine. I've had it set up on my Mac in the office for a little while. No negative implications. It's very stable, all of that stuff. So there's it does this, but it is very much one person. Private cloud right now, there are no sharing features. So I couldn't put something in my private cloud and share that with you. The only way I could share my private cloud with you is if I gave you my login and password and then you had access to everything. So it's a one person private cloud solution right now. There's no public folder for inbound stuff or anything like that. That might be coming. They get CES when I talked to them, they said, maybe, you know, so. So there's that you're still with me, right, John? Yes, sir. OK, all right. You've been quiet, so I just want to make sure. And then there's local storage is sort of an interesting thing. On iOS, you can pick file by file, whether or not you want that stored cached locally or just available in the cloud. On your Mac, you just choose how much data you'd like to let it cache locally and then it chooses what that data will be. Now, in theory, because you're on a local network with your Mac or if you're on the local network with your Mac, that's great. On the road, that starts to get a little weird, I think. And it feels like it might just be, you know, kind of first in first out method, but but I can't really tell for sure because I haven't filled up my Mac's drive. So so it's interesting. It's got a little bit of of smarts when it comes to movies. If you put movies on this thing, it will do some lookups in terms of metadata and thumbnails and stuff and and and let you watch the movie. So that's kind of cool. And if you have two Lima units, it will and I don't have to. So I can't test this, but it looks like you can set them up in a essentially a mirror, potentially even in two different locations where they they each are mirrors of each other's content for backup purposes. It one interesting thing, John, when I set this up, you know, it says, you know, configure the Lima plug your hard drive in. Now, I just had an HFS plus formatted drive. I figured I'd see what happened. It had a little bit of data on it, but not very much. I plugged it into the Lima and it went through the setup process. And then it said, do you want to encrypt your data now? And I thought, sure, that's fine. That sounds great. That would actually be really nice if, say, you know, I stored my second Lima at the office or at your house, right? For offsite backup or whatever. So now you can't touch my data, even though you can take the drive and plug it into your Mac. So I said, yes, let's encrypt it. It said, OK, go to your Lima now and unplug the hard drive and bring it back and plug it into your Mac. OK, fine. So I did that and I plugged it in. It said, OK, now we're going to encrypt your drive. So it did the it used my Mac CPU to do the kind of first wave of encryption of all this data that was previously on the drive. Then it said, OK, you're done, eject it from your Mac, bring it back to the Lima. Now, the Lima can obviously encrypt and decrypt the data because otherwise it would be worthless. But but it was interesting. I found it interesting that it decided to, you know, do the sort of the bulk work up front on the Mac. But I mean, it worked fine. And, you know, the thing is it's it's one hundred twenty nine bucks for the Lima Ultra, which is coming soon. I think you can get on a wait list right now. And then there was an initial Lima with Lima, which I think is ninety nine bucks. And I think there's a processor CPU difference in them and some speed stuff. For one hundred and twenty nine bucks, you're getting really close to what you would pay for an empty two bay Synology, right? Like, you know, a two eleven DS, two eleven J or whatever those are. But they're a little, you know, beyond cloud, whatever they call it. Is it? I forget. I think it's beyond cloud. But that little two bay Synology, I think you can get for like one forty nine or one sixty nine. And not only is it a two bay unit, you still got to provide a drive on either one. And but then with Synology, you get cloud station, which does let you do all the sharing. It has the inbound stuff and all of that stuff. But then you also get everything else that that you can do on a Synology. So price wise, you know, I I'm not convinced that this is in the right spot. That said, simplicity wise, this is pretty good. But it's it's very feature limited at the moment. But it's reliable. So, you know, there you go. Many any questions on that job? Not really. No, I get it. I mean, if that's all you want to do, no, I'm with you on the pricing, you know, because you could get an inexpensive Synology that would do this as well and more. Right. Yeah. Yeah. For a little more money. Yeah. I don't know if there are any Synologies that are one twenty nine. No, but you can put but you can put bear drives in a Synology. Whereas with this, you have to get a USB drive that's, you know, self powered or bus powered. Right. I mean, it's like, you know, you're yeah. Anyway, it's a different thing. But yeah, I mean, I like the fact that this exists. You know, it obviously for those of you that know what the connected data transporter is or was this certainly takes the place of that as this, you know, standalone unit doesn't do all the things that the transporter does. In fact, nothing comes close to being as easy to create collaborative folders with as the transporter in terms of private cloud. Synology even isn't quite as easy as this, but as the transporter. And obviously, the Lima doesn't do any sort of collaborative folders. But but pretty good. I don't know. I like that it exists. It's good. It kind of, you know, drives the innovation of the market and all that stuff. So the pricing, we got to sort out, though. Perfect to be perfectly honest with you. So anyway, that's that's that, John. Hey, can we talk about the the premium stuff here, John? Yeah, absolutely. OK, cool. So I had well, let's talk about sponsorships and premium and all that stuff. So like I said, I intentionally kept the show blank so that we could take a little time to talk with you folks about sponsorships and premium without also then, you know, using time in the show to to, you know, actually deliver a sponsor's message. And sponsorships have actually, as you can tell by listening, been going fairly well. And and I I certainly have no complaints about the way the sponsorships are handled. Just so you folks know the intention as we come into each show, we generally promise our sponsors a 60 second spot. We generally intend to deliver them somewhere between 90 and 120 seconds for that spot. So under promise over deliver, that's what we do. We try to obviously be obvious that it's a sponsor spot that we're doing and also make it interesting for you for the stuff where there's, you know, it's obviously related to the topic of the show. That's very easy to make it interesting and content like, even though we're not trying to obscure the fact that it's a sponsorship. We just want to make it valuable for you. I guess that's the right way. And and so I'm wide open on any comments you have about, you know, what you like about the sponsorship, what you don't like that kind of stuff. And you and you folks have been pretty good about that over the years. But I just wanted to re welcome all of those types of comments because it's important that you find value in the show and that you don't feel like we're, you know, overstepping or anything like that. I find that when I can effectively deliver a spot in 90 seconds, that spot actually performs better in all the metrics that we can track than say a three minute spot. And so we've really been working to keep the times down because it's more effective for the sponsor, which means it's better for you and all that stuff. So so that's that's something we've been doing here, but would love to to hear your thoughts on on any of that, whatever it is. So and then and that the sponsor stuff certainly gets us to a point with the show, you know, financially, where we can do what we need to do. And then, frankly, the premium offering is really the thing that gets us the rest of the way. So it could it could be argued that the premium offering is really kind of the foundation and the sponsor stuff is, you know, the the the extra, it doesn't really matter how you look at it. We at the moment, both are are are vital to what we do here. In terms of the premium thing, you can learn all about it at macobserver.com slash shop or macgeekab.com slash premium is probably the best place because that will always direct to the right place. Premium offering is really in response to the fact that many of you just wanted to contribute directly to what we're doing here. And and so that is what it's for. We do offer some stuff. We are a little behind on our next gift round. Once you hit a tier, once you've donated a hundred bucks, you hit a gift here, we're behind on this year's gift round. But but I've actually got an idea that I want to talk to you about, John, that just came to me yesterday. I think it's going to work out perfectly. But so we're going to be doing that soon, actually, perhaps very soon. And but in addition to that, it you also get the premium email address, premium at macgeekab.com that we prioritize so that you really do get, you know, faster response to your questions and all that stuff. But the main point of the premium offering to to make no errors about it is for those of you that want to support us directly. That's that's really, you know, we put we put the work in regardless and and we appreciate your support. And it like I said, it really, really helps us. And to that end, we want to start acknowledging you individually. But we don't want to start outing you necessarily. But we want to start acknowledging you and thanking you in the show individually. Yeah. When you so you can the way premium works for those of you that don't know is you can either sign up for a monthly contribution to ten bucks, a biannual contribution of twenty five or a one you can make a one time contribution of any amount you want at any time. And at the moment, we accept PayPal and credit cards, pretty much any credit card you could think of. We're actually working on Apple Pay in the browser. It's it's evolving in a way that it probably starts to make sense for us to do it. But we've been obviously watching that since since Apple announced it because it makes perfect sense. So but right now, no Apple Pay, just PayPal and or credit card. You do whatever you want. You can set it up and it will automatically bill you if you want to do it that way or you can just do one time stuff. However, and you get your thank you email from us. And it's obviously automated when that happens because, you know, we're computer people and that's how we do things. But we really do appreciate it. So what I want to start doing and what we're going to do right now, John, we're going to list all the people who either contributed for the first time or renewed in essentially the last week. It's a little bit time shifted. I think it's like Thursday to Thursday based on when I prepped this list and we'll do the same next week and the same the following week. And of course, interested in your thoughts on all of it. And so the list is thank you very much to John V. Thank you to Stephen A to George M to Craig R. Thank you to Andrew B to you, Nick S to you, Fernando F to David H. Not this David H. This David H. Thanks that David H and the rest of you to Andrew S to Giles C and to Royce T. So that's effectively this week's. And thank you very much. There have been more since Thursday. I know you'll be caught in the next one. I just want to make sure I have to come up with a system that I make sure I don't miss anybody. And that's how we're doing this. So premium shout outs are being added to the premium thing. And I don't know why it took us this long to do this. We're slow, you know, we're thankful. We're just slow. We frankly, we've got other things to work on. So that's all that's what I have to say. John, do you have anything? I've been rambling here. Do you have anything to add to this before we before we get back to, you know, the show? I just have one thought, which may make it easier to contribute. Yeah. So I like the thing, the Apple Pay through a web page. Yeah. I haven't actually yet done a purchase using Apple Pay through a web page. But what I have done, Dave, I think was a group on actually is doing an Apple Pay in an iOS app. So I'm wondering if we can get our. Yeah. So the problem integrated into the the app somehow. I think we can. But I think the problem is we have to give Apple 30 points on that. Oh, I think I may be wrong about that. But I mean, that's an in-app purchase, right? You know, so you did you did Apple Pay in the app, not just build to your iTunes account. Is that right? Yeah, it basically said, oh, you want to buy a group on which one of the cards in your wallet would you like to charge it to? And this one, they're like, OK, here you go. That's true, right? Because when you buy from Amazon in the app, that's not an in-app purchase, huh? Yeah, I see what you're saying. Because I found it was unexpected the last time I did a group on where it said, oh, yeah, you want to you want to do this? Right. This is why I haven't put it. I haven't talked to Corey about putting it in the app. Actually, we did talk about it and we decided not to because it was like, well, you know, we got to give up 30 points. But if we did it as an Apple Pay thing. Why couldn't that sort of avoid the the in-app tax? Because it's not really an in-app thing, huh? Yeah. All right, I like this idea. I mean, I know Apple gets, well, they get a much smaller piece. Oh, just like the payment processor, right? Yeah, yeah, we give up somewhere between one and a half and three points to either PayPal or your credit card or whatever that works out to be. Yeah. Yeah. But that and that's fine. So yeah. And Koran in our chat room is asking if we've ever considered Patreon because he he sponsors a couple of podcasts there. Obviously, Patreon came into existence after we sort of hand built our premium program. And I've mentioned that my entire career exists building things for myself that I should have at the time realized we should have turned this into a product, you know, like the first CMS we built internally. And then WordPress came out, you know, this premium thing we've done. We built an ad server, yada, yada, yada, right? That's my career. I'm just an idiot at not seeing these opportunities along the way. It's like, we have to solve a problem. We scratch the itch. We move along. We don't stop to pivot. And maybe we should have. So so I haven't used Patreon just because we already had our own system in place. But in terms of adding it is yet another avenue I that's probably a good idea, especially if people are there already sponsoring, you know, other shows. So. All right. Cool. I like it. Yeah. And I'll look at this in that thing. That makes perfect sense to do that with Apple Pay, John. Oh, yes. OK. It's all about making it as easy as possible. That's the key people to give other people money. That's it. I've always said, you know, and this is just, you know, now we're now we're transitioning into a topic that we discuss in my small business show at business show dot co. But. You know, like if if you're in business and there's a transaction to take place, like to your point, John, it you should as the proprietor of that business, it's your job to make it as easy as possible for your customers to give you money. Now, you know, I say the word customers and I cringe a little bit here because I really don't think of everyone that listens to this show as a customer in that sense. But I in sent in another sense, I do think of you all as customers because I've always said every business, no matter what business you're in, is the customer service business. And what we do every week here is serve all of you. So in that sense, yes, very much so. But but only in the only in that sense. Yeah, I don't think it's a bad thing because I know it's not, especially when I did the corporate thing. We actually had this concept of different divisions being customers of one another. Yeah. So for example, it and their support role, we were as users considered customers of it. Yeah. In the beginning, they didn't see it that way. They were like, no, you're here to serve our needs. And we're like, no, no, no, no, no. It's kind of think about think about it like that, but reverse it. Right. Yes. Yes. You're you're very close. Once they got over that, I still remember we had a discussion one time I was part of a team that was coming up with a service of agreement called an SLA. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, you know, we got a this was in the early days, like in the 90s and our certain departments were Mac based. And we're like, OK, well, you know, we need a commitment from you as far as what level of a Mac support you're going to offer. And they're like, OK, and they put in the service of agreement. We're offering no support for Mac. And OK. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to have to switch that around a bit because the thing is, everybody paid into the I.T. Pot, if you will, as far as, you know, of course, we pay you money or we get billed in order for you to provide service. And it's like, so for you to choose pick and choose what you want to offer, especially when we pay you. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't isn't right. No. Not very customer oriented. Right. And it's true. We do this show. I mean, we love doing it. I certainly do. I feel like I can speak for you in that regard. But. But, you know, we do it for you folks. So yeah, cool. All right. Let's get back to this. I've got another tip here. Andy wrote in, he said, this is a weird one that I run across this week. This is after restoring my iPhone 6S backup to my new iPhone 7 and repairing my repairing, not repairing, but repairing my Apple watch. The two would no longer talk with each other over Wi-Fi like they used to. I use this all the time at work, leaving my phone on my desk and roaming around the building. Anyway, the solution that he found is that the watch is only past the Wi-Fi credentials. If it is currently connected to the phone when you first connect the phone to Wi-Fi. What I did was to forget the Wi-Fi network on the phone and then join the network again, typing in the WPA2 key and all that while my phone was right next to my watch. After going through this, now it works again. I can roam around work and the connected icon on the watch shows the cloud icon in the control center again. So very, very cool stuff, Andy. Thank you for sending this in. I have definitely been experiencing this and have been having all kinds of weird Bluetooth issues and not Bluetooth issues, but battery issues with with my phone, because I don't always wear my Apple watch. In fact, I generally don't wear it if I'm working in the office because just I don't need it. But but when I go out and certainly when I travel, I find it very valuable. But but I've been, you know, I mess around so much with my Wi-Fi networks here that that I forget I'm forgetting things and re-adding things all the time. So I'm sure the last time I had re-added my main house network, this wasn't there. So very interesting stuff. Thank you. Thank you, Andy, for sending that in. And I never would have thought about it this way. So cool, right, John? Sure, I learned something new. I mean, I knew it before the show, but I learned it because of the show. So I feel like that's OK, that that fits. Yeah, no, good. I mean, all right. Bill asks, he says, I'm sure you saw the the news of the alleged hacked iCloud passwords. And of course, we did. He says, I see that over at Mac Observer, you reference changing your password and enabling two factor authentication. However, what if you were already using two factor authentication? Should you still say change your password or are you safe? So very briefly, of course, we talked about this on our TMO Daily Observations podcast, which I highly recommend you all listen to every day. Usually about 20 minutes. Great, great little show that Jeff Gamut puts together. But we talked about this. But briefly, what happened is there's this hacker group called the Turkish Crime Family based in London that. Said we have like, I don't know, let's say three million iCloud sets of iCloud cloud credentials. And if Apple doesn't pay us seventy five thousand dollars by April 4th in Bitcoin, of course, we're going to go and wipe out all the data in these accounts. Now, seventy five grand, they should learn to ask for a little more. But but no one believed me. No one took them seriously, probably partially because they asked for seventy five grand or a hundred grand in iTunes gift cards. Yeah, it's just like the comedy. I'm just thinking writes itself. Well, the the Dr. Evil comedy potential, you know, he's like, you know, I want one million. And they're like, that's not a lot of money. Right. Yeah, they should have asked for a million at least. Right. At least to get somebody's attention. Jeez, seventy five grand. Yeah. What's the average salary of like people that work at Apple corporate? My guess is because it's in Silicon Valley, that it's probably higher than seventy five grand. I don't know that. And that might be, you know, somebody might yell at me for acting like a spoiled white boy or something. But for saying that. But but, you know, I think it's close. Um, anyway, they, uh, they so they they started reaching out to the press and they reached out to ZD net in the UK and they gave them fifty four sets of credentials. All all it was was email address and password. And so ZD net went and they were smart. They I messaged every one of the people that whose credentials they got. They made sure the accounts were valid. All fifty four were valid accounts. So they I messaged them. Not everybody was configured with I message, but some of them were. So some people responded. And what they did is they said, look, we're with ZD net. You can give us a call if you want to confirm that it's us. But really, all we want to do is ask you if this is your password. And for many of those people, I think I don't know exactly how many responded with iCloud but or with I message. But there were 10 people on this list of fifty four and of a smaller list of that from that that responded. Ten of those people said, yeah, that's my current password. And one of the people said, it's not my current password, but it was up until I changed it about two years ago. So clearly they got this password list. Probably people that were using the same password in multiple places. Apple said they weren't hacked. The Turkish crime family says Apple wasn't hacked. But obviously they got this list. And it's not just all total, you know, it's not bogus. So I think it's worth changing your password. Now, if you have two factor, would that protect you against this? Yes. But it would potentially mean that only one of your two factors is now secure. So I still think if you haven't changed your iCloud password in the last year, regardless of whether or not you're using two factor, change it again. It's just not a it's a good idea to change this stuff. Semi-regularly, it's a total pain in the neck when you change your iCloud password. I changed mine on I think Thursday. I'm still like dealing with repercussions of it. You've got to re log into the Apple TVs. You've got to re log in on every one of your devices and, you know, re authenticate. And it's it's not awful, but it's like this. Oh, yeah, I got to do that, too. Oh, yeah, I got to do that. And if you do this, you have to I found on all of my Macs that not only did I have to re log in, of course, to iCloud and system preferences, which it alerted me for. So that was obvious, but I had to go back into the messages app and re log into iCloud there and that it did not alert me for. And then once I did that, I had to go to my phone and turn on text messaging or text message forwarding, which is in settings on your iPhone messages, text message forwarding. And you've got to turn it back on here after you've logged in from your from your device, from your, you know, your Mac or whatever. So there you go. Thoughts on this, John? You know, I did that recently, too. I had, yeah, I changed my iCloud password. I was reviewing my passwords. I was changing my email setup because Yahoo is making some changes. I was doing that. I was looking at my passwords, which last pass, I believe one password are two favorite password managers. Yeah, I use one. You use the other actually have a feature that says, yeah, you know, the password on you're using here kind of sucks. You should probably update it. It's like, OK, and my iCloud password was actually not that the one that I used to have wasn't that great. So I changed it and made it, you know, it generated a more complex password. And I'm like, OK. See, I can't do it. I can't do a complex password. Like I have to I've found that and my guess is you'll all find this. You've got to do an iCloud password that you can remember because there's so many times where you have to retype it in and you're in a modal dialogue on your phone so you can't jump to your one password app, copy, paste and all of that. So I have to have an iCloud password that's memorable, which kind of which kind of sucks. Well, it's not the best strategy, if that's all you're doing. But I decided to get over that because the thing is I do have the password. How do you deal with it? Like if you get that little modal dialogue on your phone that you type in your password, I go to last pass. I copy it and then I paste it. You're able to jump to last pass while that modal dialogue is up and in your way. No, sometimes I got to dismiss it. Yeah, OK, there you go. Yeah, yeah, right. It's a pain, but yeah, I get it. I'd much rather have to. Yeah, but the thing is, is that so at one point, I think I was sitting on my Mac after I had done this. And I think you had messaged me and I got a message on my iPhone, but it didn't appear on my Mac. And I'm like, well, that's kind of weird. So I look and I was actually logged out of my message account. Yep, it's because you changed your password. That's yeah, but it didn't say it didn't prompt me. It's like, yeah, I can't log in. It just said, well, OK, I'm just not going to connect because yeah, because I'm logged out different. Yeah, and when you change your password, it wipes out all of your if you're running two factor authentication, and that's sort of my my safety net, right? My iCloud password is complex, but memorable. However, I had I run two factors. So I am protected there. But when you change your iCloud password, if you're running two factor, it wipes out all of your and you should be running two factor. Like I don't want to hear any excuses from any of you. You should be running two factor. And when you're running two factor and you change your password, it wipes out all of your one time passwords that you've generated for things like busy Cal or whatever, because iCloud doesn't Apple doesn't offer an OAuth type thing for third party apps to use, which is stupid and Apple should, but they don't. So yeah, it wipes out all those. So like busy Cal, I had to go and generate a new one and log in on each computer and all that stuff. Do you run two factor, John? I'm shaming you. No comment. I'm shaming you. I had a bad experience the last time I tried to do it. So I'll do it again. Yeah, I'm shaming you. It's okay. I'm shaming everybody. And I'm not really usually that overly judgmental. I'm awfully judgmental. I just try to keep it to myself, but right now I can't. So my apologies. You can judge me for being judgmental. You're not sorry. Sorry, not sorry. Well, I'll test as you for using a terrible password. My password's not terrible. It's just, it's just something I can remember. Non-complex. Yeah, I get it. It's pretty complex. I have, you'd be impressed with my memory. It's just, yeah, it has to be something. Well, anyway, we're not even going to go there. So just whisper it. The worst part is my password is something that the family has to know. Because the Apple TVs are logged into that and all that stuff, so. Wonderful. Yeah, remember when I guessed your, yeah. Oh yeah, you guessed my iPhone. My non four or six digit iPhone passcode. It took John three. He did attempts on a train ride home from a PEPCOM to guess it, but. Just because we have a long history. Yes. So I'm like, you know, it's probably this or this or a variation thereof, and it was. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. It's okay. I mean, I can get into your bank account. So, I mean, I think we're all, we're even. So. Not necessarily, because my different, no, the thing is my different cards, oddly enough. So I use one code with one card and then I received another one. And oddly enough, the odds against this are, yeah, one in 10,000. But it was one digit off from the number that I normally use. And I'm like, oh, well, that's kind of handy. Now I can definitely get into your bank account. And then I got another card. Well, you don't know which digit. But then I have another card where it's also, when I set it, I set it as, so none of my cards have the same pin. They're all different. That's good. That's smart. Mine actually, mine don't have the same pin, but they have a pin that is generated with a formula that I can take the card and look at it. And I now know what the pin is based on looking at the card. It's only tangentially related to what appears on the card. But, and then it's put through a formula that actually I know and Lisa knows because we both have to get into that stuff. And I'll give you a security trick here. Someone said this to me and I thought about it and actually sounds kind of clever. This is already one of my favorite episodes. You know, we're diving into this stuff. I love it. Write a pin on your card, but don't write the actual pin. So if you lose it, someone will get it and they will try to log in. Now a lot of machines don't eat the cards anymore, but the thing is, if there are enough unsuccessful attempts, they're probably gonna either lock you out or deactivate the access. So, and I thought that was kind of sneaky. It's like a red herring. It's like, okay, if somebody finds the card, they're gonna think, aha, I have the pin. Well, no, you don't. Now I have another trick that I don't think I've shared publicly, but I think it's okay to share publicly because just by divulging the trick, you still wouldn't be able to guess these passwords. I have some passwords that even if somebody like hacks into my one password database, I definitely don't want you to be able to get, but I need to know what these things are. And so again, what I store in, I actually store it in a different way in one password. So it's not actually trying to log into these websites using a bogus password and then causing it to lock it out. But what I store in there is a note that tells me the way to apply the formula that only I know in my head to generate the password that I used for that site. And it's related to very interesting and separate things that no one, few people would, I don't even, you'd have to get really lucky to guess. It's not even like, you know, I'm using like the members of my favorite band or, you know, the names of, but it's something like that. But it's actually not, you know, the members of my favorite band. It's like something that I don't like and don't care about. So, but that way, and there's a series of numbers that are related to all of this that I will never forget that I can use. And there's a series of sets of letters that are related to this that I would never forget that I can use. And then the way I store it in there is just enough to jog my memory as to exactly which order and which sets I've used in which ways to get this password generated. So I could give you this note and you'd be like, yeah, dude, I still can't log in. And I don't even think you'd be able to guess it. I don't think my wife would be able to guess. I mean, it's not that I need to keep it from her, but I just need to keep it from anybody. So anyway, that's yet another way. Pick some topic that you have knowledge of but not necessarily because people would associate you with that knowledge and then you can generate from there. That's as much as I can help you with this without getting too close to divulging my formula and then I'd have to come up with a new one for me. So there you go. If I had thought about this ahead of the show, I would have come up with like a similar but different formula, but I didn't. So there you go. While we're on this, John, let's talk about, let's keep on the security thing. Adrian wrote in and said, with the news of our home internet usage data being sold by our ISPs, I'm looking for a whole house of VPN solution. I currently use Eero. What are my options? So this is interesting because there was something in the news this week about how, there's some legislation that will essentially allow the ISPs to not only track your browsing history or the sites that you visit, they're not actually tracking your browser, they're just tracking where you've visited because that's what they can see. And then potentially selling that for marketing purposes or other purposes, but just someone else having that information is sort of a little creepy. And so having a VPN, of course, is one way to obscure that. Now, of course, you have to make sure your VPN provider isn't tracking that information, but it certainly does bypass your ISP because all your ISP sees is that you're connected to this VPN and then the traffic that goes is encrypted. There's a few things to consider with this. Number one, using a VPN will mean that your location will at best be obscured and maybe incorrect. This might not matter for most things, but when you do Google searches, your location is factored in to what results they're gonna give you. If you search for weather, it's gonna just give you your local weather. And then also like, you know, probably surface results from weather.com, things like that. But it tries to be smart about this based on where you are. So that might screw you up a little bit. You just have to, that's sort of a cost of doing business here. Some sites penalize VPN connections by asking for extra CAPTCHA style authentication. They know that this basket of IP addresses belongs to a VPN. And it's like, okay, you know, you might not be the same person I saw the last time from this address. So I'm gonna make you authenticate a little bit extra. Not awful, but, you know, just worth knowing. You might run into bandwidth issues if you run a whole house VPN. If your VPN isn't able to pass data to and from you and or the sites that you visit as fast as your home connection. Generally, this shouldn't be a problem, but just be aware, you know, that you wanna do some bandwidth tests to make sure the VPN you choose is the right one. And then depending on how you set up your VPN inbound connections to you could be affected. So things like the private cloud stuff that you run, like a Lima or a cloud station or Plex, some of those might not work again, depending on how you set up your VPN. And then, now that we've sort of gotten that out of the way, John, the VPN itself, your router, an Eero does not support a whole network VPN. Some routers do, the Synology routers do, and support it, you know, pretty easily. You just type in the how you want it to log into the VPN, it'll do it, tunnel all the traffic there. TDWRT does this. They don't all work with every VPN, but. Oh, network. Okay, but I can tunnel, but I do tunnel into my, okay, no, I see what you're saying. Your Mac can tunnel to a VPN, but if you wanna do a whole house VPN, the easiest way, you don't have that with Eero. And to be fair, it's not just Eero, it's most routers don't support it. Some do, but it's a geekier feature, at least right now. Now, you know, six months from now, everybody might be supporting it. But, you know, the only other way to do it would be to, to keep your existing router would be to set up like a Mac mini or even a Linux box and treat that as your router and then have that tunnel everything to a VPN. It gets to be a very geeky setup, but there's no law of the universe that says that all the computers in your house need to treat your, you know, the thing that's plugged into your cable modem as their router. They can treat another device as their router and or their gateway, I should say. And you would set this up in your network preferences and you just point to this other computer as the gateway. That computer takes all the traffic that comes into it and tunnels it to a VPN and then everything's fine. Again, it gets to be a much more complex setup. You could, for example though, you could go the other way around. If you like Eero for its mesh, you could do the, what we've referred to as the Uber decadent and delicious, deliciously decadent solution of running a Synology router as your router and then the Eero for your mesh Wi-Fi in bridge mode. That would be another way to do it. And that's, I mean, that would be killer, right? So those are the, those are the things I have. What do you think? About the issue in general? Well, about how to, like this whole house VPN thing. Yeah. I have to think about it some more. Yeah. I mean, most of us, I mean, most of us especially doing Wi-Fi, I mean, your traffic is at least going through the air should be protected with the encryption, which we'll get to in a moment. Right. But even with that though, the, once you're, the places you're visiting are not encrypted. Like your ISP can see that you and I are connected right now. I assume that because neither one of us is running a whole house VPN at the moment. That might change to be perfectly honest, but at the moment it doesn't. So, I don't know. It's interesting though. I like the- There's something to think about. Now, the other thing is that I read up a bit more about this. There are several articles about this. I think we may have even written one here. Yeah. I'm looking at one though that says, so another aspect to this is talk to your senators, talk to your representatives. Well, the thing is this whole issue, mostly along party lines, and we'll step away from the politics, but just, you know, as you may have seen with recent events indicating your feelings through whatever means possible with your senators or representatives, can sometimes have the desired effect. Yep. And I would say telling your senator and representatives, I don't think this is a good move. You know, and I may not vote for you if you vote the way I don't like it. You may have an influence. No, I'm with you on this. I agree. We work very hard to keep politics out of the show. But as it comes to issues like this, it's a little difficult to keep it out of the show. So, yeah, no, I'm with you. Personally, I don't want my browsing history sold. Now, I say that, but at the same time, I use Google constantly as my search engine. So it's a very hypocritical viewpoint, although it really comes down to freedom of choice, right? I am very much a believer that everyone should be able to do whatever they want with their eyes wide open. Now, a lot of you folks that listen to this show, you keep your eyes wide open about this stuff. I mean, how could you listen and not? We talk about what the implications of this stuff are all the time, but a lot of people keep their eyes closed. And that's where I start to be worried about this. Like if I want to use Google, that's fine. I know that they're going to track what I search for and they're going to use that to build a profile on me or to add to my existing profile and then target me with ads. I know that I am the product that Google sells. And that is what it is. For me, it's mostly fine, but I have a choice. I can use other search engines. I could use DuckDuckGo if I wanted to really be, well, I mean, if I wanted to have some level of anonymity, I could use Tor as a browser or as a setup. And if you're going to use Tor, Tor, Tails, and I'll put a link in the show notes to it, tails.boundboum.org is the easiest way to do that in a secure way. You know, that keeps me super secure, not entirely, but mostly secure. But when I really don't have a choice as to my ISP and we're saying that all ISPs are going to do this anyway, I don't like that, that starts to bother me. So, yeah, but I'm just all about it, you know, but choose whatever you want. I just don't force people into choice. From what I can read though, it's not like it's going to take effect immediately. There's still some time for this to happen. I think the Senate voted on it, the House has yet to vote on it and, you know, the big cheese could veto it if he chooses. So it's not a done deal, but it's good that awareness has been created. Totally, totally, yep. But also it might not be a bad idea to just set up a whole house VPN. I'll protect yourself, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I'm actually thinking about, I might try it just to see what the implications are, but I can't try it right away because I need to be the VPN for a little while. My son and my wife just found out this week that there is a school band trip to China happening in four weeks and they're going, they're doing it. It was a very, it wasn't a last minute thing, it was just announced last minute, but it's actually a very well organized trip and they're going to be traveling throughout China. So I posted in our Facebook group about what they should do for a data package for their iPhones while they're there. And of course, if you have any thoughts about that, I'd love to hear about it. But also there's the great firewall of China that it keeps a lot of Google traffic from happening often but not always, keeps Facebook from happening often but not always. We haven't heard about it blocking iMessage and probably it wouldn't because of Apple's decent relationship with China, but you have to assume if you, you know, I want to cover all bases. So to get them set up, I've been looking at what VPNs they should use. And there's a lot of great advice coming from you folks. It sounds like Astral is kind of one of the best ones for this but folks like TunnelBear, people have had a lot of luck with TunnelBear, TunnelBear and I think PureVPN might have been the other one. But the thing that people have had the most luck with surprisingly is the built-in Synology VPN. And running it on your own router because they don't block that kind of stuff with the great firewall. So I've, of course, we already had a VPN set up with that and so I'm just gonna make sure not only that they can connect to it, you know, and I have a dynamic IP address or dynamic DNS thing for my IP address here. So I'm gonna set them up each with at least two VPN profiles for the house. One that uses the DNS lookup, the dynamic DNS lookup and the other that uses whatever IP address the router is set for, you know, pretty much the moment they leave just in case just so that they can skip the DNS lookup and just get right to it. So fun stuff though. So if anybody has any advice for them in general about traveling to China but very specifically about, you know, connectivity. I wanna, you know, this is gonna be the trip of a lifetime. They're gonna be there like 11 or 12 days and they're gonna be in, I think, three different cities. They're doing a lot of the kind of tourist stuff but they're also, his school band's gonna be performing at least two silent movies while in China, which is really cool. And I, I'm so bummed that I can't go, but I had, it would be the wrong thing for me to cancel on not one but two theater shows for which I'm playing drums that are, that would, that overlap this trip. So I had to, had to say no, but it really bumps me out because I don't know when, when I might get this opportunity again, if ever. So pretty cool though. So if anybody has any, any VPNs, advice or data, SIM advice, anything like that, I'd love to hear about it. You can visit our Facebook group. I'll put a link to this particular post for the Facebook group in the show notes but also feedback at mackeycap.com, John. That's right. Feedback at mackeycap.com. I said feedback at mackeycap.com, John. Except if you're one of our four mentioned, previously discussed premium users and then of course you get premium at mackeycap.com. And then we use the honor system for that folks. And I tell you that mostly because I, I know sometimes we'll get two or three emails from one of you saying, I sent this but I can't remember which email address I'm subscribed to premium with. We use the honor system here. So if you send it to premium at mackeycap.com, it comes into premium. We don't do any filtering of who you are. And you know, it's just how it works. We're all families here. We trust almost all of you. And honestly, you know, if you need to get our attention quickly, premium is one way to do it. And I wouldn't fault you if, you know, if there's something going on and you need to get to one of us, but there's other ways, frankly, to get to us. You can, you know, email us directly. I'm not going to say those here in the show, but you can pretty much guess what they are. And then I'm going to quickly, at least one thing. One thing that we use, Dave, and you know, we may not respond immediately, but it can attract our attention would be the twitters. Of course, I am, I am John Efron. He is Dave Hamilton. The podcast is Mackeycap. The publication is Mac Observer. Oh, and that other guy, Pilot Pete. That's all on Twitter. So we've gotten some tips and queries and stuff through Twitter, but, you know, it's kind of limited because, you know, 140 characters, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Yeah, yeah, but you can message us there. My, I keep my Twitter messages wide open. So even if I don't follow you, you can still message me. I, you know, that's totally fine. I have no, no issues with that. So they sometimes get buried. So please don't fault me if I don't reply to you. But, you know, sometimes things get a little harried out there. And the same is true with Facebook Messenger, but yeah. All right. While we're on the subject of international data and SIMs and all of that stuff, Roger has a question. He says, what do you recommend for a Verizon customer with an iPhone to use when traveling to France in the UK for a few weeks? Should I use Verizon's international data plan or buy a cheap SIM chip over there? Any particular plan recommended? So what I've learned after we traveled to Europe last summer, and of course we discussed that here and got all the advice from you. And now as I've begun digging into this China thing again is if you're going to choose to get an international SIM for your phone, you pretty much have to, the simplest way, the way it's geared is you have to get that SIM in the country that you're going to use it. Because generally all the laws and regulations don't allow you to use like a US credit card to top up your SIM. So you have to be in that country to do it unless you have a credit card like for your example with either a France or a UK address. Now when we traveled to Europe, we wound up using a company called Three Wireless, THRE, which is based in the UK. We actually had a listener, Mike, that really helped us out and got us some SIM cards ahead of time so we were able to do some of the work. But even that, he got us the SIM cards, which was awesome. But I only was able to top up two of the four of them by using this kind of shady website that did it and then they blocked me after I did two of them. They're like, yeah, you're not in the UK. We're gonna get in trouble for loading up more than two. So we landed with two SIM cards, but as soon as you get off the plane, there's kiosks in the international terminals of every airport, including here in the US, by the way, you just might not see them because you don't need them but they are there and they are happy to very quickly and efficiently sell you, not just a top up for the SIM that you might already have, but a SIM along with it. So that's probably gonna be the easiest thing if you're gonna go with an international SIM. Now, if you only need data and you're not doing it in your iPhone, you can use a company called GigSky that is built to do this. In fact, GigSky, they've got a little app. You can use the app to top up once you get to a country, it's actually really quite brilliant, but it doesn't work in the iPhone, only in the iPad. So that may or may not be your best bet. That said, lots of the US carriers are offering very inexpensive international data plans, especially if you have an unlimited data plan here in the US, it's generally a lot cheaper than it was even just a year ago because they know it's very easy for you to get off the plane, take out your existing SIM, put in a new one and you're fine in that country. They'd rather keep your money and then you can also keep your phone number. It's very interesting when you're traveling because you stop getting text messages that come in to the number that belongs to the SIM that's no longer in your phone. It makes sense. It's just something you don't think about ahead of time. So it's tough for people to get in touch with you if all they have is your SMS number. Verizon actually does some stuff about this too, right, John? You can get Verizon SMS's in an app, I think, in a different way, but yeah, there you go. Thoughts about this, John? Not until I travel, I don't make the last minute decision. Yeah, yeah. The last time I traveled, it was hokey. So one, Verizon was CDMA only and I actually, what I ended up getting was kind of set up a forwarding mechanism where it forwarded my US cell number to the one that I had when I was in Paris. Now, it's a lot better because, of course, the iPhone is how, even the Verizon one, as far as I know, is a world phone. Right, right, yeah. It's not CDMA only. I guess they prefer CDMA if they're using it in the US but I should be able to use it to some level overseas. But then, of course, there's the data. Yeah. Yeah, so Verizon is, I think it's like 10 bucks per day per device, which, you know, yeah, it's not awful. It's not great. So you might be able to make it work. So anyway, if you do need or decide to go the route of a separate SIM when you're traveling internationally, just buy it in the airport. It really, if any of you that travel far more than me have advice that contradicts that, obviously, please share. But that certainly seems to be the simplest way. And honestly, the data plans that I got for, I wound up topping up Lucas and I before we left and it was Lisa and Skyler that I couldn't do. So I had to do that just when we got off the plane. And theirs were cheaper and better plans than, or better, it was cheaper data to buy on site than it was to go through one of these shady things where I had to, you know, I probably had to lie to the guy at some level. So anyway, fun stuff. All right, let's see. We still got some time here, John. Andrew, why we might as well stay on the security thing for a little bit here, because it's what we do. Andrew says, I was monkeying around with my airport extreme and for no good reason, except because I could, I changed my airport time capsule Wi-Fi encryption from WPA slash WPA to personal to just WPA to personal. A few days later, I noticed my NetApp mobile weather station wasn't working in that it wasn't connected to my network. I tried reconnecting and it said, it couldn't connect to Wi-Fi. It offered a range of whys, including can't hook up to enterprise grade encryption. That got me thinking, he says. So I wound up putting the airport time capsule back to WPA slash WPA to personal and now everything works again. So even though it says personal, NetApp will considered it enterprise, at least for me. In this internet era of things, he says, just be aware that not everything has high levels of whatever, so be prepared to wind back. Am I at any risk running WPA slash WPA to personal versus just WPA to personal? Before we answer that last question, which I'm gonna throw to you, John, I have a NetApp mobile weather station. I run everything here as WPA to personal only and it connects just fine. So I don't know, but I don't run an Apple router. So I don't know what the difference is there. So I just share that, but I run lots of IoT devices here and they all have no trouble connecting to WPA to personal and they also have no trouble connecting to the same SSID used for both 2.4 and five. So I share that. Yeah, what do you think, John? I'm gonna tell you what I think here. I think they have, it could either be like some stupid export restriction thing or because they've had this, where everybody thinks they have the best encryption and it can't be exported, so they dumb it down if it's exported. Right, right. I'm wondering if that's what's happening. NetAmo is a French company, I wanna say. All right, yeah. Because there's a difference here. All right, so the thing is you have WPA and WPA too. Right. To the question of am I at risk by using WPA? Yes, in that it's... So here's the history. So first they had this thing called WEP, which is probably better than no encryption at all, but it's easily hacked. And once they realized that because it was just a bad implementation, they then came up with something called WPA. Okay, WPA is better. So I think WEP is wired to criminal piracy. WPA is, I forget off the top of my head. Anyways, WPA built on WEP, but they added something. So it still uses the RC4 stream cipher, which is really not what you're supposed to be using for encryptions. Stream cipher is not meant for encryption. But they used the same algorithm, but then they added something called TKIP that added some more security, but it's still relatively, if you know what you're doing, easy to crack. WPA2 is the big boy here. It uses what you may have heard of called AES, Advanced Encryption Standard. That's what you want to be using. So I guess the advice is, so I think it's either an export restriction or something. And then if you have a choice between the two, use WPA2. If you use just WPA, you may be at risk for people being able to intercept that traffic. So it's enterprise encryption. The thing is that I want to differentiate that from, because a lot of Wi-Fi access points will have personal and enterprise, but that's different, okay? So enterprise level encryption is not the same as enterprise level Wi-Fi deployment. Typically enterprise level Wi-Fi typically involves the reason that it's enterprise is that it usually includes an additional authentication factor, whether it be an additional password or sometimes what they call the radius server and maybe sometimes a little fob or something like that. So I want to differentiate between enterprise encryption and enterprise. So what they're saying is we don't support this type of encryption is really what they're saying here, this device. Yeah, okay. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I'll dig up. I found one article that basically compared WPA and WPA2. It's the algorithm that's being used and not the type of Wi-Fi deployment that is what it's complaining about. That's weird. I mean, weird because I have exactly the same thing. Okay, so Andy in the chat room says, to just encapsulate it says enterprise versus personal just means pre-shared key versus radius or certificate authentication on enterprise. So yeah, when you set up the WPA2, you give it one key, right? And that's what you would call your Wi-Fi password. Whereas with enterprise, you would log in with a username and password which it then authenticates with a radius server and all of that stuff. So yeah. Probably a better way of saying what I said, which is, yeah, which is multi-factor, right? Yeah, multi-factor. There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. All right, John, pick Daniel or Scott for the next one. I think we've only got time for one, so. Let's save Scott for later. All right, cool. Though it's interesting. I know, I agree. All right, so Daniel has an interesting question. There are a number of interesting things here. So he says, hi guys. I have a computer that I work on for someone that has this pop up from time to time. There was a problem connecting to the server. I won't mention the name of the server. And oddly enough, Dave, when I tried to look up this address, it does not resolve. It's a .gov address, so we're just gonna leave it at that. Yeah, but the thing is, if you try to look it up, even the primary domain here, it does not exist. So that I find kind of weird. Interesting. Yeah, you try it too. Maybe it's my DNS, but I don't think it's my DNS. It just doesn't resolve. Which is probably why he got the message. It's a problem connecting to blah, blah, blah .gov. The server may not exist or is unavailable at this time. Check the server name or IP address, check your network connection, then try again. And that's pretty much the standard message you will get from the OS when something instructs it to connect to a TCP IP server or device. Yeah. Or device. The user did not deliberately try to make this connection and I cannot determine why this is happening. I'm well-versed in OS X, now Mac OS. Right. Are you? No, you should be well-versed in Mac OS, my friend. And I've looked extensively for the source slash reason for this pop-up, login items, keychain items, activity monitor, console, et cetera, et cetera. Nada. The owner did a wiped our hard drive, a clean OS install, and a data restore. Pop-up seems to have been banished, but no, it comes back again. I've run some terminal commands that are supposed to find this, but did not find anything. Suggestions, please. And I wonder if you have any additional ones here, Dave. So my initial suggestion, there is a tool out there that I love to death and you tolerate, Dave. But I'm almost certain would be able, I'm positive, fairly positive, 99% positive, this would identify it. And it's our friend, Little Snitch. If you haven't heard about it, what is Little Snitch? Little Snitch is a tool that will basically alert you as to when an outgoing connection from your Mac to something else, somewhere else, is attempted and will do two things. One, it can let you set up a rule saying, yeah, that's cool, allow this, but it also shows you, now you have to click on a detail button, but it also shows you in excruciating detail, the process, who asked for this to happen. It's not shown by default because it's a lot of info, it can be a lot of info, but that's my initial recommendation would be to install Little Snitch on this machine. And at some point you're gonna see an alert saying, hey, whoever, and that's what we're trying to identify, whoever is trying to connect to the server. And then you can track it down and, I can't say now why it's happening. I'm wondering if they're going to a webpage that's installing some weird script or something in your browser, you may wanna. Yeah, yeah, it could be a JavaScript thing, that's right. But still, Little Snitch will point to what process it is that's attempting to connect to this. Yes, there's another thing. So if you do wanna go into the terminal, there is a command. At first I thought Netstat would do it, but Netstat doesn't really give you process information, but here's one, Dave, and it's kind of non-intuitive. There's a variation of LSOF. Now you may say, well, LSOF, that's, well, LSOF, so LS in Unix, of course, is a list that's in a directory. LSOF will list open files. Let me say, well, John, a network connection is in a file. Well, it kind of is, in Unix land, the two have a lot of similarities. So whether you're talking to a network or talking to a file, but it's still non-intuitive. But if you say LSOF space-i. Okay. It will show you a list of processes and network connections. Oh, look at that. I always do that with Netstat. Huh. I never realized that. But it's adding the process in the first column. Right. And I can see a boat. I mean, there's a boatload here. I mean, I see login, win, D user event. I see Dropbox. I see Google. I see OneDrive. I see pretty much anything. Can you have LSOF run in like constant output mode? You know, so it doesn't just take a snapshot. It constantly shows things because what you could do is you could do LSOF-i plus whatever it is that tells it to just keep running. And then obviously that would just be barfing output constantly, so you would pipe that with the pipe carriage space, pipe space, and then grep, which is a search, a regular expression search, but you can just type in raw text. So you could type in this domain in there and then it would only show up when that domain happens. Right? Well, yeah, Wireshark would be another way to do it. And that would totally do it because you can filter Wireshark by anything you want. I do that when I'm looking for like STP packets or whatever. But I think LSOF will do it. I just don't know exactly what the thing is, what the constant output thing is, but I'm sure it's got to exist. Come on, it's one of those deals. All right, anyway. Now the last thought is that you may have a program on your system scheduling this activity. Totally, yeah. And one place you could look for this, Dave. So for example, I noticed this at one point. If you go to our friend, the Apple menu, and then you hold down option, system information, power. So you see a whole bunch of stuff, but then at the bottom here, Dave, so one thing you may wanna see if somebody has scheduled an event to try to make a connection here. For example, I see something here. I have a wake event and it's from com.bombic.ccc.scheduletask because I schedule a backup. Right, right. You may wanna see if there's anything listed there. Somebody may be, some program may be trying to schedule this network connection. Yep. Now the thing is, where does that live? So we're peeling an onion here. Yeah, exactly. And having a lot of fun. Yeah. I'm not crying yet. Yeah, that's the problem. Peeling an onion for too long and you start to cry. The thing is, this could be a formable task. So again, you want suggestions, I'll give you suggestions. Another thing you could do is to use a tool like Lingon to see who has scheduled. Now the thing is that can be kind of overwhelming unless you get some hint as to what program is trying to do this. But Lingon will show you all of the scheduled tasks. Yep. On your system. That could be kind of overwhelming. The last thing that I'm thinking of, Dave, is that if you do go to Activity Monitor and he said he did, there is a portion of Activity Monitor. I believe it's a network. And that'll show you, very similar to LSOF-I that I talked about, it will show you a list of all of the processes that have some sort of network connection. Yeah. But again, it may be hard to tell which one is doing this. I mean, you can get details. If you double click on one and then you say, I guess show files on ports, you may see that the name of that server in there somewhere, that.gov server. But yeah. I like your idea of either doing Wireshark and doing a filter or somehow writing a little task that can constantly monitor LSOF. I think there's got to be a way. I just- I'll put it and say, all right, when you see someone connecting to this, then spit it out. Maybe you could do an Apple script or a... Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I live in the terminal all the time. But yeah, yeah, yeah. But I bet LSOF can do it. I'm not finding it quick here because I've never used it that way. But to me, it's just wacky because the server does... I don't know if... Oh, you know, I'm wondering if, you know, it could be an internal... It may not be an internet addressable address. This may be like a local... Oh, yeah, it could be. I wonder if just computer is in a government installation. Yeah, it could be right. It could be a VPN thing where you're running your own DNS that then, yeah, who knows? Yeah. Fun stuff, man. I like ending the show on Super Geek Mode. We could... As you... I'm sure you can tell if I hadn't brought the band in, we'd stay here and do this for like another 30 minutes. And to be perfectly fair, we might. So we'll end the show here because it's what we have to do. And then while we're prepping the show to send to all of you, we might still begin to this in the chat room. So... MacGeekUp.com slash Stream, as we mentioned. Folks, thank you so much for listening. We've told you how to get in touch with us. I also want to send a big shout out to thanks to cashflycaffly.com for providing all the bandwidth that gets from us to you. We alluded to our sponsors, but the ones that are on what we call auto renew that are just on ongoing campaigns with us, we like to thank those in what we call our podcast marketplace at the end. And those include Smile at smilesoftware.com, Otherworld computing at macsales.com, Barebones software at barebones.com, and Blue Apron at blueapron.com slash mg. Gee, folks, thank you so much for everything, for listening, for having fun with us, for doing what you do. Coming up on 12 years here, pretty awesome. John, thank you for putting up with me for, well, a whole lot more than 12 years. Hey, man, have everybody have a good week. John, you have a good week. I will see at least you, John, on Wednesday, and hopefully many more of you listening here at the Connecticut Mac users group. And if you are traveling to that or whatever you're doing this week, make sure that you travel safely, that you have fun, and that you follow the one best piece of advice that we can share with you, that you don't get caught. I think. Isn't that the right thing to say? I think it is. Made of metal.